We were out with the family looking for whales and a pod of 12 transient killer whales were chasing the seal. It ripped towards the boat in a desperate escape and scrambled on the deck. It fell off three times in panic and finally stayed on until the whales gave up after about 30-45 minutes. Most intense epic experience ever.

The U.S. Government has arrested the alleged owner of KickassTorrents, the world’s largest torrent site. The 30-year-old Ukrainian was arrested in Poland today and is charged with criminal copyright infringement and money laundering. In addition, a federal court in Chicago has ordered the seizure of several KAT domain names.

Looks like our favourite (and most dependent) torrent site may be in a bit of trouble…

Last week, the authorities in the state introduced new legislation that updated rules that had until then made it legal for girls aged 12 or 13 to get married if they had parental consent and were pregnant.

All I can say is that I’m glad that the US, as a world leader and example to other countries, is so progressive.

We wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of The Drakensberg before. It almost sounds like a region in Game of Thrones, but it’s not: it’s a mountain escarpment in South Africa, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the subject of the timelapse above, and probably the newest addition to your bucket list.

Pebble Round appeared on the Pebble Smartwatch site today. Basically it’s what you’d expect from Pebble, it’s a smartwatch, using the same colour e-paper display, battery life measured in days, iPhone and Android compatibility, etc.

Looks like they got around the ‘flat tire’ look of the Android round smartwatches by making the bezel wider (probably hiding a square(ish) display behind it that only uses the circle). Also they specifically say “battery life measured in days” and not the “7-10 day battery life” from before (though I don’t remember 100% if that’s how they said it before). Maybe the smaller profile means less battery by a bit? Who knows.

Driving a car like this onto an incline — basically any driveway — is a surgical procedure that requires hyperactive situational awareness and a thought-out stratagem. Driving slowly and deliberately isn’t enough: if you don’t plan correctly, that just means you’ll scrape the undercarriage in excruciating slow motion. (And I don’t want to know what happens if you bottom out at high speed.)

Universal Music Group has hijacked several YouTube videos of Bjorn Lynne, an independent musician from Norway. The world’s largest music corporation is now running advertisements on videos of music tracks Lynne created, and is refusing to correct the mistake.

Seriously a nightmare scenario, combining huge bureaucracy, tons of money, and a real David vs Goliath fight, except I suspect in this case David isn’t going to win.

All of the core functionality we introduced in version 1.4 last August still exist in 2.0, letting you securely share folders across all platforms, with visibility into who has access.

A bunch of new functionality has been added, from enhanced user interfaces across desktop and mobile platforms to a new certificates-based security model with even greater control and ease-of-use. Go here to check out all the many new features in Sync 2.0.

Pebble is back on Kickstarter with Pebble Time, their next generation smartwatch.

Highlights:

Color e-ink display

Up to 7 days of battery life

Microphone

Waterproof

A “timeline” feature (the “Time” in “Pebble Time”) which lets you see what’s coming up and happening.

Ships in May

I’m pretty excited about this one, but honestly, I’m wondering if I’m going to wait to see what the  Watch looks and feels like. Not because I think I’m getting one, but because I’m wondering if it will simply blow everyone else out of the water or not, and if I’ll feel like I’ve got an old and busted thing on my wrist.

The ad makes a powerful point — all without ever showing actual violence. As the camera pans across a wrecked home, a woman can be heard calling 911. In the recreated voiceover, a woman tells the 911 operator she’d like to order a pizza. At first exasperated, the operator then realizes the caller is in danger, using the pizza order as cover while her abuser stands nearby.

Frankie MacDonald is a Canadian man with autism who has an insatiable passion for all things meteorological.
He even broadcasts his own online weather show and his hugely popular videos led to CBC News giving him the chance to present a segment on their program.

[…] told us that since our employers had become silent investors in this prison business, it was now in their interest to make sure that these prisons remained filled. Our job would be to help make this happen by marketing music which promotes criminal behavior, rap being the music of choice. He assured us that this would be a great situation for us because rap music was becoming an increasingly profitable market for our companies, and as employee, we’d also be able to buy personal stocks in these prisons. Immediately, silence came over the room. You could have heard a pin drop.

We installed the top 10 apps from Download.com, and you’ll never believe what happened! Well… I guess maybe you might have a good guess. Awful things. Awful things are what happens. Join us for the fun!

Shockingly (not really) download.com is not the useful utility and site it used to be back in The Good Old Days(tm).

Seeing inside a Rolex is a pretty awesome sight. The video is beautifully shot, and shows just why (I guess) you have to pay Rolex an extra arm when you get your watch maintained (or so I assume, having never owned a super-fancy watch).

Also I had no idea how many specialized tools and gizmos there were for watches.

JMAP is a new protocol that is introduced by FastMail as a proposed replacement for IMAP (and friends) for an open standard solution to doing push updates to email.

While I completely agree with them, this is needed, currently there’s no universal solution, etc etc. However it ticks the same box as most “we could stop spam dead” solutions…. everyone would have to adopt it.

Not only that, but it’d have to be added to all the existing (boring, unfun) infrastructure code (like postfix, exchange, etc) to provide the services to all the mobile providers.

LOS ANGELES — It takes a very particular set of skills to get us interested in a movie’s social-media marketing these days, and in this case, 20th Century Fox has acquired them — on the most boring social-media site in the world.

Archie’s Press: Vancouver is a fantastic city map that explains Vancouver like I’ve never seen it before (and I’ve lived here all my life). On their products page there are most other major North American cities available.

Drone footage of an aiport shows what you can do it you’re allowed to fly a camera drone at an airport. You can’t in the US and (I assume) Canada, but in Mexico, where this was taken, the filmmaker worked with the airport and tower to make sure everything was safe, and produced a very cool video.

According to Forbes, AT&T is testing a similar code insertion program that will allow websites to track AT&T customers. Like Verizon, AT&T has plans to make the tracking codes temporary as a “privacy-protective measure,” but according to one of the researchers that discovered the tracking, Kenneth White, the codes that AT&T is sending to some customers are persistent.

If you were thinking of trying Dr. Oz’s “magic weight-loss cure” of green coffee bean extract, don’t waste your money. The researchers responsible for the only scientific study backing up the television doctor’s claim released a statement today saying the study was bogus.

Does this shock anyone? Seriously? Anytime you hear ‘weight loss pill’ you can mentally replace that with ‘bogus BS waste of money’ and I can guarantee you that 100% of the time you’ll be correct.

A great look at the Tesla D over on the verge. Not only detailing the amazing performance, but also the (basically) driverless driving.

Eventually Tesla is hoping to tune its autopilot system into something that will let people just kick back and be a passenger in their own car. But if the trip through the neon tunnel of terror is any indication, it’s more fun to gun it.

Watching the video midway through the article is definitely recommended.

When you see the title of Bizarre Russian Dash Cam Videos, you think about the sort of things you’ll see. This has them all. Just what you think. I do recommend if you’re only going to watch one, watch the embedded one below, acts of good samaritans caught on video, though the others are awesome as well, but in a different way.

The folks at Instagram have detailed The Technology behind Hyperlapse. Hyperlapse is the technology for smoothing out (though it’s much more than that) time lapse videos.

Hyperlapses are a special kind of time lapse where the camera is also moving. Capturing hyperlapses has traditionally been a laborious process that involves meticulous planning, a variety of camera mounts and professional video editing software. With Hyperlapse, our goal was to simplify this process. We landed on a single record button and a post-capture screen where you select the playback rate. To achieve fluid camera motion we incorporated a video stabilization algorithm called Cinema (which is already used in Video on Instagram) into Hyperlapse.

Good news today for iTunes podcasters: Adam Carolla has won in his fight against patent trolls Personal Audio after more than a year of litigation. The outcome likely means that the patent troll will cut its losses with suing other podcasters, something it has been threatening to do with others in the community throughout the case with Carolla.

This is pretty cool. It’s a project to use GPS and a mini-camera to find out Where Your Cat Goes. Some of the information (as well as the cat that randomly (it seemed) went to a strange house far outside their usual prowling area) is pretty interesting.

Following an announcement back in December and some renders that popped up a few months back, today the USB 3.0 Promoter Group announced the next-generation USB “Type-C” connector is now ready for production. That means that PC and smartphone manufacturers can now adopt the standard, which the Promoter Group describes as “the final piece in developing a single-cable solution” for the industry.

Looks good, only thing that worries me is it looks like it’s got the super thin “tongue” in the middle, which means it’s still gone one of the downsides of current USB devices with it potentially being fiddly or prone to breaking. I know a lot of people don’t like the stuff the Apple does, but the lightning cable has similar benefits (reversible, small, etc) without the middle tongue. Time will tell I guess.

Photo-editing software restricts the control of objects in a photograph to the 2D image plane. We present a method that enables users to perform the full range of 3D manipulations, including scaling, rotation, translation, and nonrigid deformations, to an object in a photograph.

A boy scout coming back into the U.S. after a trip with his troop to Canada found himself at the other end of a pointed gun when he reached for his suitcase without permission. The situation unfolded when the boy scout took a photograph of a border patrol officer as they were crossing back into the U.S. The officer he was photographing “immediately confiscated his camera, informed him he would be arrested, fined possibly $10,000, and receive 10 years in prison,” Troop Leader Jim Fox said in a statement to KCCI.

The gun was drawn because the child reached into his suitcase “without permission”. I didn’t realize that when you’re waiting at the border / talking to a border guard you need to ask permission for anything.

Trigger warning for anyone who’s ever been through this. You will have a raging PTSD episode.

This has been going around the last day or so and I had to link it. The PTSD trigger warning is apt, and I’m four minutes in and feel ready to go into a rage. I can only imagine how many calls to Comcast go like this that haven’t been brought to the Internet’s attention by Internet-Famous people.

My brothers to the south just had their July 4 celebrations, and while a lot of the posts and videos coming out are a lot of the same, this one of a DJI Phantom Flying Through Fireworks is probably the coolest of the bunch. Happy belated Fourth of July!

If you don’t know what these are, they’re small charging accessories to let you charge your iPhone (or Android) phone from a tiny charging accessory that’ll fit on your keychain, in your wallet, or not, from a carabiner.

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

The Programmers plead: “If only you’d let us refactor! We have a sick design; it actively prevents us from adding features sensibly. It encourages us to do the wrong things. It encourages us to duplicate code, which makes mistakes seem inevitable. It has code that nobody understands any more, and so when we have to change it, we need weeks to read, to research, to gain confidence that changing it won’t anger our existing customers. If you’d let us refactor, then we could spot design improvements that would unblock new features, that could reduce the cost of new features by 20%, 30%, 40%, and more! Why don’t you let us refactor?!” They appear to have a point.

Especially relevant for someone who just spend 10 minutes telling his bosses “it depends” when they ask questions and wanting simple and clear answers.

And sometimes the “healthy habits” you saw on the show were no such thing: My season made a big deal of showing us all drinking our milk to prove how nutritious it was. But as soon as “cut” was yelled, the trainers made us spit it out. Calories do not trump calcium, apparently.

As many are aware, the first major round of subscription renewals from the original App.net launch happened a few weeks ago. We have been anxiously anticipating what our subscription renewal rate would be in order to do budgetary planning. Since we have not been sure what to expect the renewal rate to be, we mentally prepared ourselves for a wide variety of outcomes.
The good news is that the renewal rate was high enough for App.net to be profitable and self-sustaining on a forward basis. Operational and hosting costs are sufficiently covered by revenue for us to feel confident in the continued viability of the service. No one should notice any change in the way the App.net API/service operates. To repeat, App.net will continue to operate normally on an indefinite basis.

Saw on twitter that @blairbunting, a photographer I follow, has a great page and video up of Flying with the Thunderbirds. Seriously cool stuff, head over and watch the video (embedded below) but only if you have a big monitor and promise that you’ll watch it full screen and in HD.

Actually, not like that one. It’s not nearly as good. The iPhone can learn five fingers; the Samsung only three. The iPhone doesn’t care about the angle of your finger; the Samsung requires you to place it perfectly straight every time, aligned with the screen. The iPhone reads your fingerprint with a touch on the Home button; the Samsung requires you to swipe your finger — the full height of your finger across the button.

While I started reading The Pinnacle of Fitness Failure article via The Verge, I originally figured it was a bit of a hit piece, but as I read more and more, it really sounds like a complete lack of design and set up sense purveyed the entire product.

Very interesting read on The Fallacy Of Android-First, if you’re looking at doing development. This is from guys who abandoned their iPhone prototype and decided to go Android-First, and then some time later went back.

And yet, according to Google Analytics, our app has been installed on over 300 different devices since October. In some cases, those “devices” might be different variants of the same device, but bear in mind that, for instance, the Verizon Galaxy S4, the AT&T Galaxy S4, and the direct-from-Google Galaxy S4 are running at least somewhat different operating systems.

Very good read on some of the challenges of developing for both major platforms, and no, it’s not all about “fragmentation”.

Moon | Typeset In The Future is a fascinating look at the typography (and some inner details, as well as spoilers) about the movie Moon (2009). Great stuff for you designer types, or anyone who appreciates little details in a great movie.

You can grab the code and re-live the world of single user, single tasking, not having to worry about shutting your computer down, rebooting to “fix” things, or just search through the source code comments for naughty words.

Our objective here is to create a perfect maze, the simplest type of maze for a computer to generate and solve. A perfect maze is defined as a maze which has one and only one path from any point in the maze to any other point. This means that the maze has no inaccessible sections, no circular paths, no open areas.

To find out exactly how it happened and what it was like to work with the Commander-in-Chief, we spoke with Scott Aukerman, host of IFC’s Comedy Bang! Bang! (the third season premieres on IFC on May 8) and executive producer and director of “Between Two Ferns.” He talks about how the White House let them get away with basically everything, how the president was easier to work with than some celebrities, and what it was like to give notes to the most powerful man on earth.

Most of what I know about Bill Gates is from the Dark Days of the Linux / Windows battles of the late 90’s and early ’00s. Reading through the list of stuff he’s done I have to say he sounds like a pretty kick ass guy. Though I don’t know about his kids ‘making their own way’ with only the $10m…..

“I don’t think he’s in any trouble,” I say. “I would like to ask him about Bitcoin. This man is Satoshi Nakamoto.”
“What?” The police officer balks. “This is the guy who created Bitcoin? It looks like he’s living a pretty humble life.”

Basic things that should really not be complicated are borderline impossible on Windows. For example, how do you create a bootable clone of your hard disk, so that you can boot from an identical external USB hard disk in case the internal disk goes belly-up? On a Mac, you just download Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper17 and run it. In case of emergency, connect the external disk, start the Mac, hit Option, select the external disk, you’re done.

Also:

That’s not an isolated example. Finding software for Windows is a nightmare. Windows users sometimes complain that Mac software is expensive. Maybe it is, but on the plus side, it generally tends to work, and typically doesn’t fill your computer with adware and browser toolbars and background processes that install weird buttons in the toolbars of all of your freaking windows.

It’s definitely not a Windows 8 / Surface hate-fest, or an iPad love fest. He finds lots wrong on both sides of the fence, with the conclusions reached fairly interesting.

(And if anyone tries to tell you that ultra-expensive mobile broadband is somehow competitive with wired service, ask that person to buy you a nice dinner and tell you the story of when they realized dignity had a price. You’re talking to a cable industry lobbyist; they can afford it.)

Remember how Facebook spent $16 Billion on a messaging service? The Verge has some good thoughts on Why Facebook needed WhatsApp to explain just why such an ungodly sum of money went to it instead of say, feeding the hungry, providing medical for a small town for a year in the US, cancer research, or something more interesting than the acquisition of 450M active monthly users.

Yikes. Can this possibly be true? At first blush, this sounds like an incredible overreaction. This report was filed by NBC’s Brian Williams and Richard Engel, not some novice journalist. There’s background assist from Kyle Wilhoit, a Senior Threat Researcher at Trend Micro.

I saw the original video yesterday, and other than the abhorred way that they opened that poor, defenseless MacBook Air box, it just smelled of sensationalism and…. something was off. Glad that some more real information was tracked down.

The show assembles a harem of attractive women who attempt to woo one man not just with their charm, but their bodies, their insecurity, and their willingness to suppress any part of their personality that might make them seem difficult—in particular, their innate discomfort that this man is availing himself of numerous other women as he speaks to each of them about feeling a “real connection.”

Join us as we live the time-traveler’s dream—the deep, lucid, Orwellian vision of hope, fear, and nostalgia that is 1984. Just in time for its 30th anniversary, we laid hands on an ‘84 original: the Macintosh 128K. And, you guessed it—we’re tearing it down like it’s the Berlin Wall.

New York was a very different place in the 1980s. Throughout America, and the world, it had a reputation for being a crime-riddled, dirty metropolis - one much changed from its bustling, mid-twentieth century prime. And nowhere was this more evident than on the city’s subway trains and platforms. Once the pride of Manhattan and the boroughs, the network had become a virtual no-go area both at night and during the day. Indeed, even a cursory glance at crime statistics shows us that in 1985 there were approximately 14,000 underground felonies - a far cry from today’s approximate 2,000.

I’m pimping Super Fantastic Nerd Hour! for a friend, but if you’re on this page, chances are you’ll be interested. Have a look at the preview for episode 1:

It’s the first episode of the Super Fantastic Nerd Hour! We discuss the forces that turned us into super nerds, why we created this show, and break down origin stories from Gilgamesh to Luke Skywalker. We throw Man of Steel’s Clark Kent against Monsters University’s Mike Wazowski in the INFINITE CROSSOVER CHAMBER and countdown our top 5 favorite origin stories.

Sightsmap is a very cool site, which gives you an overlay “heatmap” for photos taken in a particular location, and using data from panoramio shows you the images all geolocated on the map. Very cool, though if you take the time to look at the images, you’ll realize there is a lot of crap out there :)

Pretty cool article from a Recovering Windows Phone User, comparing the Windows Phone world with the iOS one (though sounds like it’s easy enough to lump in Android as well). Some interesting observations, such as:

Xbox music sucks. In every way imaginable. It’s not like iTunes is so great - it’s not - but XBOX music really is terrible. Zune was and still is the best music app - why can’t we get that experience on our phones/tablets? It’s not like they don’t already have the code! Get a grip and get it right.

I’m not a huge fan of metal watches, but I have to say that when Pebble Steel was announced I had the “new shiny” syndrome, now my original pebble looks and feels completely inadequate, even though other than a new form factor and a single LED is the only difference between the Steel and original version.

Still, the announcement keynote had some goodies about what’s going on and coming next. Sadly nothing immediate, the apps (FourSquare / Yelp / etc) are all coming soon. No word on changes to the 7 faces/app limit as well, but still, I’m excited about what’s coming next.

Today 500px (my favorite photography site online) announced an evolution of it’s marketplace, called 500pxArt.com:

500px Art offers 28 options for base materials, styles, frames and multiple sizing options to choose from. Payment processing is available in over 20 currencies and shipping is world-wide (your most requested option is here!). As a dedicated site, 500pxArt.com is accessible to anyone looking to purchase and sell exceptionally beautiful photographs.

Fascinating look from MailChimp about What Does Your ISP Say About You? Not only does it tell you a lot from your email, but shows what type of user users what ISP and what browser. Point of fact: people still use AOL, AND the AOL browser.

512pixels has some excellent thoughts On the failure of Healthcare.gov. I too am a web developer and even in the small scale sites I’ve dealt with have these issues, and I can only imagine that on a site like healthcare.gov the issues would be multiplied a bazillion-fold.

Instead of trying to repeal the law, if the government should be spending time revisiting how it purchases and deals with IT. If that can’t happen, more than just healthcare will suffer in the future.

It’s sad that the over-legislation of everything government-oriented means that reasonable and sane things, like having affordable healthcare for everyone get lost in a complete clusterfuck caused by horrible contracting, bad project management, and what I can only imagine is the farthest possible thing from “agile” that you can imagine.

The Chinese National Space Administration has successfully launched its Chang’e-3 lunar probe to the moon. If all goes well from here, it’ll be the first Chinese spacecraft to land on an extraterrestrial body — and the first rover to land on the moon in four decades.

She never feels safe, even with her parents just downstairs. The unruly-looking mob in her driveway is there to help her feel safe again. They are members of the Arizona chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse International, and they wear their motto on their black leather vests and T-shirts: “No child deserves to live in fear.”

Seriously, how amazingly cool are these bad ass mofos?

If the man who hurt this little girl calls or drives by, or even if she is just scared, another nightmare, the bikers will ride over and stand guard all night. If she is afraid to go to school, they will take her and watch until she’s safely inside. And if she has to testify against her abuser in court, they will go, too, walking with her to the witness stand and taking over the first row of seats. Pipes will tell her, “Look at us, not him.” And when she’s done, they will circle her again and walk her out.

I want to be part of a gang like this. It seriously brings a tear to my eye just reading the story.

“Are you afraid?” No, the boy said. Pipes says the judge seemed surprised, and asked, “Why not?” The boy glanced at Pipes and the other bikers sitting in the front row, two more standing on each side of the courtroom door, and told the judge, “Because my friends are scarier than he is.”

The Belle-V Ice Cream Scoop by Belle-V Kitchen on kickstarter is really the only innovation in the ice cream scoop industry I’ve ever seen, and I’m a big fan of ice cream. Seriously cool. They’re over halfway to their kickstarter goal too, lets make this happen!

Somehow I missed posting this last week when I saw it…. don’t watch on a bit monitor full screen and high resolution if you get vertigo at all, bit if you do, this Backflip Over 72ft Canyon, plus the rest of Kelly McGarry’s bike run is insane to watch.

Sad news today on the Everpix Blog that the photo storage and sharing service is shutting down :( I’ve followed Everpix for a while now and really thought they had “made it”. They were well loved by the photography community.

She is now a beacon for hoped success of the Modisa Wildlife Project, founded in Botswana, Africa, by Mr Gruener, from Germany, and Mr Legarth, who is Danish, with the hope of saving the lion population.

You might think the hardest part of setting the cross-country driving record is driving across the country. You might think the hardest part is staying awake for more than 24 hours, or constantly keeping your foot on the floor. You might think the hardest part is round-the-clock vigilance for law enforcement. You’d be wrong.

Justice is done! No, not really. Seems the cop that pepper sprayed the protesters a couple of years ago got $38k in workers comp. Some of the details are a bit crazy to be believed, read JWZ’s commentary here as well as the link to the full story.

It must have been so hard for him to get his salty, salty tears out of his riot helmet after all of those mean, mean emails.

Big shout out to my buddy Jeffery Saddoris for his excellent facelift to the best photography site on the internet, Faded + Blurred. A great responsive layout and a great focus on the images. Excellent work!

Given those two facts, we thought it was a good time to add data about Pokémon to Wolfram|Alpha. In many ways, Pokémon are an ideal subject for a computable knowledge engine. They have a set of well-defined characteristics with lots of numbers to which we can apply our analytic capabilities. Heck, Pokémon come complete with their own unique identifiers from the game’s internal database, the Pokémon Index, or Pokédex.

I have no idea about Pokemon, but this does look cool to have all this info in a searchable, computable, form.

Square Cash Sounds too good to be true. Email someone an amount, CC cash@square.com, and they get the money (after signing up with Square if they haven’t already). There is no step 3. Also, notice that if you send them $20 they get $20, and you pay $20, no fees.

No more pricing grids. No more fine print. Sending and receiving cash is free without gimmicks.

Nice review of the service at All Things D. The biggest catch right now is that it only works in the US with debit cards from MasterCard or Visa. Still, even if this is just a play by Square to get a huge number of signups, it sounds like a great deal, and it concludes with:

[…] Square Cash is the quickest, simplest method I’ve seen for sending money from one person to another.

The extension works both on the search portals’ main sites, as well as through a browser’s omnibox (in the case of Firefox) or browser bar (in the case of Chrome). (The “search from everywhere” feature is still in beta.) Disconnect says that it has applied for patents to protect the proprietary way in which it does this.

I like this as an option, but honestly, the fact that google is tracking me means that I get personalized search results that tend to be more relevant and therefor, more valuable. This isn’t the case for everyone though, and having a nice and easy option like this is a great thing to have available.

So how many megapixels do you need? Here’s the shortest answer we can muster: for most purposes 3MP is plenty, but you might want to shoot at around 8MP for the crispest possible details. 8MP is a sensible minimum for big prints and 4K TVs, and even higher resolutions allow you to crop photos without sacrificing quality too much. However, make sure that very high resolutions are matched by an equivalent increase in sensor size.

Today, we’re launching a new program to say thanks for spreading the word. Now, whenever you invite your friends, family and coworkers to Evernote, you’ll earn points that you can use towards Premium subscriptions, monthly upload limit increases and more.

Basically if you’re an evernote user, you can get access to premium features by getting your friends to sign up to evernote through a referral link. You collect points which you can redeem against a ton of interesting stuff.

As an evernote user, and someone who is a huge fan and has written about them a lot in the past, I’ll encourage you to now go and sign up and check out the benefits of Evernote.

If there is one sentence in the entire blog post that tells the whole story, that is it. This shows that not only does she lack an understanding of design — which is fine, it’s not where her strengths lie — but that she also doesn’t know it; that designers consulted were unable to disabuse her of this ridiculous notion; and that the final result pleased her, when it is obviously flawed in this regard.

The official Blu-ray has seven mini-featurettes. Seems kind of bare bones for such a major summer release, eh? Indeed it does, because Paramount has divvied up all the other features — including the commentary tracks with the cast and director J.J. Abrams, and several additional featurettes — have been given exclusive to the Target release, the Best Buy release, and the iTunes download. Meaning 1) if you buy the normal version you’re getting less than half the special features created for the home video release, and 2) if you want all of them you’re going to need to purchase at least three separate versions.

I’m sure that this sort of thing has nothing to do with people pirating movies. Heavens no.

When I got the opportunity to redesign the Instapaper website my goal was to do justice to the service Instapaper provides. In the FAQ quoted above, Marco referred to the “information-skimming, speed-overload mode” we often enter while surfing. I think of Instapaper as a place I can go to take a break from that mode, and I wanted the design of the website to signal and support that break.

Since the founding of Big Fish more than a decade ago, we have continually evolved to meet the ever-changing landscape of casual gaming and the needs of our customers. Thanks to the incredible drive and dedication from all of you, our company remains healthy, with steady growth across multiple lines of business, and we have hugely popular games that are enjoyed by millions of paying customers. In fact, 2013 will be our 11th straight year of record revenue and we remain profitable with a positive cash flow. I am truly grateful and proud of what we have accomplished together and excited about the new opportunities ahead of us, which is why this message is especially hard for me to write.

Wanted to share this writeup over on Faded + Blurred about the photographer in New York Brandon Stanton, who makes Humans Of New York. This last paragraph is great writing, and inspired me (note: emphasis mine) -

There is power in photography, not just for Rumi, but for each of us. Each individual who has their photo taken by Brandon, for that moment, they are seen, they feel important, they feel like they matter. For all of us who look at these photographs, we are reminded that the world does not revolve around us, but we are all a part of a community. All of this happened because a guy with a camera decided to go out on the street and take photographs of strangers.

Make sure you subscribe to both Faded and Blurred and HONY, on all the social media places.

Perhaps the most ambitious project from XKCD has come to and end. The author talks about XKCD 1190: Time in the latest blog post.

I have to admit that I saw this when it came out, and with a lot of people sort of said “huh”, and continued on. I’m glad that there was follow up and an ending, as well as great resources (viewers, discussion forum links) to make you feel like you can participate and see things as they went along.

Case in point, look at the astronomy section of the wiki. People figured out what year the comic took place in by examining comic star fields. Seriously, this is deep(ly awesome) nerd territory.

So apparently the new cool thing (and I use “cool” with huge implied airquotes) to do is climb into the cages with balls on the floor of Walmart (not what I think of as a “ballpit”, but whatever). This is apparently The New Walmart Ballpit Meme on Vine.

I think this is great. Use this to figure out what people should be sent to [insert remote land here] to remove them from the general population. Easy!

A fantastic photographer and internet friend of yours truly (kinda) announced today that his first eBook TEN is now free. This is a great deal, and even at the $4 or $5 that his eBooks over at Craft & Vision normally it’s a great deal. It’s an eBook all about creativity and getting out of the ‘gear rut’ of photography and back into the Vision side of it.

Oh, did the users screech and holler when Marissa Mayer’s purple people-eater bought Tumblr for $1 billion about how she was going to take away their nudie pictures forever. Ads were swiftly thrown into the Tumblr dashboard and now, a few months later, the crackdown on Tumblr porn has begun. “Tumblr welcomes free expression, but we have to be sensitive to the millions of readers and bloggers from different locations, cultures, and backgrounds with different points of view concerning mature/adult-oriented NSFW content,” the Tumblr team says on a page explaining the new guidelines that appeared today.

Every Pixar movie is connected. I explain how, and possibly why. Several months ago, I watched a fun-filled video on Cracked.com that introduced the idea (at least to me) that all of the Pixar movies actually exist within the same universe. Since then, I’ve obsessed over this concept, working to complete what I call “The Pixar Theory,” a working narrative that ties all of the Pixar movies into one cohesive timeline with a main theme. This theory covers every Pixar production since Toy Story.

In what’s likely an effort to bring improvements to its Smart TV software, Samsung has reportedly just acquired Boxee, a company which specializes in creating home media center devices, for the tune of $30 million.

Hopefully they can make it so you can actually reboot a boxee box through the menu, which it seems you can’t do right now.

AT&T had earlier denied that any plans had been made to discontinue the handset, but there had seemed little doubt about the handset’s future after the carrier dropped the price from $99 to 99 cents. Even Facebook itself went as far as telling users that the front-end could be switched off …

[…] The Sony Smartwatch 2 has officially been unveiled, sporting a new design, new interface and a cornucopia of new features. Specs include a 1.6-inch (220 x 176) touch display, NFC for easy pairing with your Android phone, Bluetooth 3.0 wrapped inside a dust and water resistant (IP57) aluminum body with a design reminiscent of the Sony Xperia Z. Sony will also include a stainless steel wrist band with the Smartwatch 2, but users will be able to personalize the device with any standard 24mm strap.

At 2,717 feet, 160 floors, and almost a kilometer in height, the Burj Khalifa is the tallest manmade structure in the world. Now you and I can tour it without ever visiting Dubai, courtesy of Google Street View. But with heights like these revealing the city of Dubai, the sea, the interior passages of the building, and the highest pool in the world, Google is going to have to find a new name for “Street View.”

I think that if you click on this link you can start the street view journey. Or just search for “Burj Khalifa” on google and go in through the normal maps interface.

Let us be 100% clear: Content promoting or glorifying violence against women or anyone else has always been prohibited from Kickstarter. If a project page contains hateful or abusive material we don’t approve it in the first place. If we had seen this material when the project was submitted to Kickstarter (we didn’t), it never would have been approved. Kickstarter is committed to a culture of respect.

Fourth, today Kickstarter will donate $25,000 to an anti-sexual violence organization called RAINN. It’s an excellent organization that combats exactly the sort of problems our inaction may have encouraged.

Well worth the full read, and good on Kickstarter for coming out and laying it on the table. Sucks they didn’t act fast enough to stop the funding for this project, but they have done what they can I think.

Over the last 90 days, the Digg engineering team — all 5 of them — has been heads-down building an updated take on the RSS reader. For our first public release, in time to (just) beat the shutdown of Google Reader, our aim has been to nail the basics: a web and mobile reading experience that is clean, simple, functional, and fast. We’re also introducing a tool that allows users to elevate the most important stories to the top.

The biggest challenge in getting a “new” Google Reader alternative is not a good web interface. It’s important, but it’s getting that and a backend interface that’s supported by all the third party clients. IE: Reeder, Mr. Reader, and the tons of other iOS and Android feed readers that need a backend. For example I use Reeder on the iPhone and Mr. Reader on the iPad, and both have to use the same backend system or I’m screwed in my daily feed reading.

Sigh. I’m still hoping that Google will change their mind and keep Google Reader around for another few years.

Google wants people to move away from the old “passive” model of sitting down and reading nows. Instead they’d like us to take an “active” approach, such as having artificial intelligence services such as Google Now tailer news and alerts based on our search preferences.

I read this as “we need to push people to Google Plus, and if they don’t have an RSS reader maybe they’ll use it more.”

But we still have a long way to go. We have been turning to the community to finalize the roadmap for the rest of this year - thanks for the 3,500+ ideas and the tens of thousands of votes you casted on uservoice. This is what it looks like:

[…]

We have been working behind the curtains with the developers of Reeder,Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader as design partners for our Normandy project[1]. Today we are excited to announce that you will be able to access your feedly from all these apps before Google Reader retires and that the access to feedly API will be free. More details soon.

Honestly I’ve still got my head in the sand about Google Reader going away in less than a month, hoping that they’ll change their mind. I’ve played with a few alternate feed readers, but the issue is that without a single dominant backend to sync everything. I use Reeder and Mr. Reader on my iOS devices, and the web, all backed by Google Reader. I’ve played with Feedly but it looks (to me) too…. “magazine-y” for my taste. My big worry is that feed readers will adopt a backend that had a crappy web experience, and as a user of multiple Operating Systems, I’ll end up getting a crappy experience when I’m not on Mac or iOS.

While at Comicpalooza, a girl asked Sir Patrick Stewart a question about what the most important thing he’d ever done besides acting was. His answer was his work with campaigns against violence toward women, which led to this impassioned answer and wonderful gesture.

I’m not sure when the current fetish for huge ice cubes started, but I’ve been noticing it for a few years now. And when I say I’ve “noticed” it, I mean I’ve seen people touting huge ice cubes on the internet—in real life, the ice cubes I come across are the same size they’ve always been. Perhaps my circle of friends is hopelessly old fashioned.

One hundred and eighteen miles north of London, in the town of Boston, England, there lives a retired newspaperman named John Richards who is experiencing an unusually rotten spring. Richards is the founder and chairman of something called the Apostrophe Protection Society. His world, at least as related to the tiny mark that denotes possessives and the omission of letters from certain words, appears to be crashing down around him.

Total apostrophes count in the article on how they arent needed anymore? 45

The trip started about 15 years ago when I made up a bed-time story for my daughter, Gabrielle. It was about a kid in the great white North, Tullik, who hated cold and hated white, and who was looking for a better — more wonderful — home. She loved the story, and asked me for it repeatedly, and suggested that I write it down.

Launching an app is hard, and huge kudos go to him for the launch!

Of course, he never reads ufies and eshews it as a source of news and breaking stories, so realistically, he’ll never see this :P

Looks very pinterest-y, with a look similar to google+ and the “masonary” photo layout. Looks good so far, hopefully it’s more than a coat of paint and they’re going to really drive Flickr to be a great site.

Celebrating the fact that the new Star Trek movie is out this weekend, here’s a list of Star Trek Science mistakes from Slate.com.

The problem is distance. Unless Delta Vega were a moon of Vulcan (and in the original series Spock says his planet has no moon), the planet would be way, way too far away to see as anything but a point of light in the sky. And that’s if it’s in the same star system; from another star, even Vulcan’s star might be too far away to see (also, Delta Vega is established in the original series as a remote planet, the location of a dilithium mining station).

Why would you need a map of the Internet? The Internet is not like the Grand Canyon. It is not a destination in a voyage that requires so many right turns and so many left turns. The Internet, as the name suggests and many of you already know, is nothing but the sum of decentralized connections between various interconnected computers that are speaking roughly the same language. To map out those connections and visualize the place where I spend so much of my time may not have any clear use, but it intrigues the pants off me.

March 1, 2013: NJABL is in the process of being shut down. The DNSBL zones have been emptied. After “the Internet” has had some time to remove NJABL from server configs, the NS’s will be pointed off into unallocated space (192.0.2.0/24 TEST-NET-1) to hopefully make the shutdown obvious to those who were slower to notice.

So grep through your mailserver configs for “dnsbl.njabl.org” and comment it out lest any issues pop up.

Great set of images from a 100 year old time capsule. Most interesting I think was that they included a player for the gramophone recorded greetings, knowing that technology would have progressed past wax cylinders in 100 years. I wonder if our “current” time capsules include the power and adapters needed to play / use whatever “modern” tech we’re including in it. How far up the chain do you go? A hand crank in case power standards have changed in 100 years?

The Verge posted their Samsung Galaxy S4 review, with a final score of 8/10. Mostly good, though Gruber points out a few interesting bits in the review (ie: the display being horribly over-saturated but still getting a 10/10) as well as a snipe at the easy mode.

Still, if you’re ready to upgrade and in the Android camp, this sounds like the phone to get.

[…] publicly available news media in the 21st century exist solely to get eyeballs on advertisements. That is its only real purpose. The real news consists of dull but informative reports circulated by consultancies giving in-depth insight into what’s going on. The sort of stuff you find digested in the inside pages of The Economist.

First, there’s photographic evidence and rumour. Then there’s some initial information—immediate numbers of dead and injured, scary photographs. But the amount of new information coming out tapers off rapidly after the first hour or two, and gives way to rumour and speculation.

Seriously, once you start noticing the pattern you’ll see that this happens with everything. I even saw a 30 minute long video posted by a “friend” on facebook today about how the Sandy Hill massacre (you know, a bunch of children killed by a nutcase) was in face perpetrated by the government (and covered up) to help ban assault rifles and continue on the world government. Or something. The 10 minutes or so I could stand of the video (think tin foil hat folks) was basically piecing bits and pieces of news from different networks and different times and you could just tell that they were grasping at straws and using what kids were telling the news right after it.

Anyway, it was disgusting and you should stay away from the 24 hour news stations. Seriously, you’ll be happier. De-friend stupid people on facebook as well.

Everyone has them, those nagging voices of fear and doubt. They only get loud when you do things that matter. And since we’re going to do a lot of things that matter, we can expect some voices headed our way. So what do we do?

Saw this this morning: “Firefly” Hat Triggers Corporate Crackdown. The short (and slightly wrong) version is that ThinkGeek got the official license to make the hats commercially, so Fox started cracking down on the homebrew DIY folks selling the hats on Etsy etc.

“The irony of it is that it’s the fans of the show who have propelled the hat into the iconic symbol that it is. The hat itself had only a few measly minutes of screen time in one episode— an episode that Fox didn’t even air.”

My response:

Dear Fox: Screw you.

I got my hat from a facebook friend who has made over a hundred of them and I will continue to support her and not ThinkGeek in this case.

Update:ThinkGeek has responded, including the promise to donate all proceeds from the Jayne hat sales to charity. Good on them.

As the cables hanging from my ears drag across the wool coat I’m wearing, the scratching sound races up the cords with perfect, annoying fidelity. If I happen to be eating peanuts while wearing these headphones, I hear the death cry of each and every peanut I consume.

Over at Inspired By Apple an amazingly reasonable post shows the craziness of tech bloggers while remaining completely rational (despite the blog name). Case in point (emphasis mine):

But plenty of LOLs at the yawning, Silicon Valley-sized gulf between the techbloggers (“OMG! Facebook will steal YOUR SOUL AND YOUR CHILDREN AND YOUR PRECIOUS, PRECIOUS, PERSONAL DATA!”) and, well, everyone else (“It’s a phone. With Facebook. And Android. And it looks like an iPhone.”) I might be wrong, but I don’t think people actually care that much.

Seriously, what the hell Georgia? This sort of crap is why the rest of the world thinks you’re a bunch of backwards hicks, and why the US gets looked down at by other countries. Not because you deserve it, but because stories like this get out and all people see is this sort of stupid, backwards behaviour instead of the good people, great deeds, and amazing advances in science, medicine, and technology that you make.

But seriously, congrats on having a prom that lets both white and non-white students be in the same place, that’s really awesome of you.

Note: based on comments on reddit (and if you don’t read the story) it seems that the school doesn’t have an official prom, so it’s up to the community to do it, which makes it a private event, which lets them keep the black people out invite whomever they want.

Still not convinced this isn’t yet another April Fool’s Day joke however.

The first thing you’ll notice about Vdio is that it’s designed to solve the “what to watch” problem. It’s not just that we’ve got amazing content, but that the experience is now geared to get you from searching to watching faster. We’re introducing the notion of Sets — playlists for TV shows and movies — so anyone can make and share lists of their favorites, making it easier than ever to discover new stuff. Or, you can just check out what your friends are watching in the moment and jump in. Beyond that, Vdio has the beautiful design and social features that people love about Rdio, with plenty more to come.

First of all, cool idea, levering the “what to listen to” technology towards video. Secondly, horribly name to pronounce…. Is it just “video” or “veedeeoh” or “veedio”?

A couple years back, I was watching Star Wars and several things became apparent to me. I’ve since explicated these revelations to a number of other people, and all of them have been persuaded. Now, to help ruin the childhoods of that many more people, I offer for posterity my proof that Princess Leia had sex with both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo after the battle of Yavin.

I know cracked.com is normally where you go for 7 hotties from the 80s or 4 mindblowingly cool video game moments, but their 5 Mind-Blowing Facts Nobody Told You About Guns is actually pretty damn intereting. For example, here’s some info about the clock tower sniper, discussing the profile of a mass murderer.

Except Whitman didn’t just “snap.” In the last months of his life, he experienced terrible headaches and violent urges he couldn’t explain. He went to a doctor, who turned him away, and in his suicide note he even suggested that they look at his brain to figure out what had suddenly changed. Sure enough, when they opened him up, there was “a tumor the diameter of a nickel” pressing on his amygdala, the part of the brain that “is involved in emotional regulation, especially fear and aggression.”

Anyway, it’s not really pro or con for guns, but more just “about” them (though I’m sure your own beliefs will color what you think the article is about. A good read regardless.

Credit goes to long time UFie RoundTop for the link showing up in my news feed originally!

The kind of rewrite I’m talking about would require a fundamental rethink of the entire platform. We’re talking thousands of man-hours for no direct financial reward. If Automattic were to do this it would require a shakeup of their business model, given they don’t make any money directly from the WordPress codebase.

I want options, but I also want a good experience. In Checkboxes that kill your product Alex Limi goes through some simple checkboxes in Firefox that will, in a couple of clicks, make the browser completely unusable, and for anyone not just a little technical, completely “break” the internet.

It’s a fine balance you need when you design a software product to give people options, but not too many, resulting in them shooting themselves in the foot. For me, KDE is one extreme (every option exposed) and GNOME / mac are close to the right mix (for me), but sometimes going too far towards the “too few options” direction. Some people whine and cry about removing options, but if you’re pissing off 1% of your users and making things easier and better for you and 99% of the rest of your users….

Dropbox says Welcome Mailbox as they acquire the very cool new Mailbox.app which has some new and interesting ways of dealing with mail (if you use gmail). They say:

After spending time with Gentry, Scott, and the team, it became clear that their calling was the same as ours at Dropbox—to solve life’s hidden problems and reimagine the things we do every day. We all quickly realized that together we could save millions of people a lot of pain.

Very cool, though I’m interested to see what the business model is here. I get a bit nervous sending all my email through someone else’s servers when I’m not paying them for the app or service. One might wonder what they’re doing with all the data to make money.

Saw this this morning: Trojan Horse Hidden ‘Beautify’ Photoshop Action Reverts Women’s Bodies to Un-retouched State. Viral marketing at it’s best of course. While I’m all for people being satisfied with themselves, young girls not being pressured by the media, etc, blaming “photoshop” is just silly. So much of what people consider “unphotoshopped images” these days are really just “bad pictures”. You can do a ton to change perception with just a pose, good lighting, and a pretty model before you start doing massive body alterations with the liquefy filter.

But lets call this what it is, a viral marketing add to get you to buy beauty products from Dove. Altruistic as they are, their goal is to get you to give them money in the end.

Twitter has announced that it will be discontinuing several TweetDeck apps in favor of the web client. The Android, iPhone, and Air-based desktop clients will all be affected; the apps will be removed from their stores in early May, and stop functioning soon after. Facebook integration will also be removed.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The clients haven’t gotten any more than a handful of updates recently, and twitter is definitely more interested in having users use their (controllable, unable to remove ads and promoted tweets on, able to push “partner content” on users from) web platform.

I’m not hugely sad about this, I haven’t used TweetDeck in ages. However I do see this as the harbinger of things to come for the also unloved desktop Twitter official apps.

Each has its own pros and cons, but which is the best? Everyone has their preferences, but I took a look at three options and picked my favorite. Here’s what I found while comparing Safari Reader, Instapaper Text, and Clearly:

The Stunt People created a short first-person perspective video on a GoPro camera in which you start as Vader himself fighting a Jedi, and then eventually transition over to the Jedi’s perspective. The results are pretty awesome…if you can get past this all going down in what appears to be an office building or something. They pulled it off in a half hour, what do you want?!

There are incentives though, if you invite someone and they invite others, you both get additional file space.

This is an interesting play, but I’m not sure if it should be seen as doom and gloom: “App.net is struggling for users and has resorted to giving the service away” or exciting: “App.net is livening up the ecosystem and bolstering their position as a social network.”

Either way, if you want to through me an invite at @arcterex I would love you forever :)

So the summary of the
Tesla vs. The New York Times story is that the NYT wrote a story about a test drive in a Tesla electric car and how they ran out of juice at the wrong times, had issues, etc. It’s worth the read. However, read it with a big grain of salt, because it wasn’t 100% true.

Tesla responded because they have all the data from the drive and so they know exactly what happened on the drive, and their facts definitely didn’t match up with the reviewers, not only some little details, but some big details.

We didn’t even know we wanted a Hobbit-themed litter box until we heard it existed. Now we can’t imagine our without it. We’ll be sure to let you all know when this bad ass box is available for purchase.

Kinda big news from Opera Developer News this morning, they posted that they are going to move to WebKit for the rendering engine for Opera.

The short answer is that it shouldn’t affect your day-to-day work. Keep coding to the standards, not to individual rendering engines; test across browsers - Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer; use all vendor prefixes and an unprefixed form in your CSS and JavaScript. However, it remains important to keep the following in mind:

The WebKit project now has the kind of standards support that we could only dream of when our work began. Instead of tying up resources duplicating what’s already implemented in WebKit, we can focus on innovation to make a better browser. Opera innovations such as tabbed browsing, Speed Dial and data-saving compression that speeds up page-load, have been widely copied and improved the web for all.

This is interesting. On one hand, I agree with the top reddit comment about how it’s got to suck for the people who have been working on the Opera rendering engine since 1994. It was the first “alternate” engine that I used and had, and still has, some pretty awesome stuff, and it’s still (I believe) one of the fastest browsers, and has some great performance on low end machines.

On the other hand though, maybe the market has spoken and crowned WebKit the third browser engine and said there’s just no place for another engine. In reality I think this is the better way. Web developers have enough to deal with writing cross platform compatible code for:

Mozilla rendering engine

Webkit (Safari, Chrome)

IE

Old versions of IE

Opera

Mobile

Three different operating systems

All the minor differences between different versions of all the above

I dislike redundancy, so I applaud this move. While I love openess and choice, having 18 different media players, all 3/4 baked and none complete or fully tested is a far worse thing (in my opinion) than having 2 or 4 really awesome media players that have full communities and momentum behind them. Sounds like Opera is up with this too.

Of course, really respectful web developers will still have to support Opera (which is pretty standards compliant already, so it’s not a huge deal) for a few years, as I hear there’s a fairly vocal Opera user group out there :)

You’ll hear any reputable Star Wars fan point it out eventually: Han Solo’s famous boast that the Millennium Falcon “made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs” may have sounded impressive, but from an astronomical perspective, it made no sense. A parsec is a unit of distance, not time, so why would Solo use it to explain how quickly his ship could travel?

Today, I’m very excited to announce the launch of a product we’ve been wanting to build for quite some time now. Since our launch in October of 2010, we’ve focused on building a simple app that has inspired creativity while capturing everyday moments through the lens of your mobile phone. In fact, our focus on building out a mobile-only experience is a unique path that we’ve chosen for many reasons, the most important of which is that Instagram, at its core, is about seeing and taking photos on-the-go. However, to make Instagram even more accessible to our growing community, at the end of last year we started to expand to the desktop web, giving you the ability to see profiles from instagram.com. To continue that path, as of today, you can now browse your Instagram feed on the web - just like you do on your mobile device. Go to instagram.com and log in to your account to give it a try.

So no more mobile only. Interesting…

Note that this is only your feed, not the ability to upload images. Looks good though.

The latest jailbreak is out, and it’s time to dissect it and document all the exploits and techniques it contains. These days, jailbreaks are so well tested that it’s easy for people to forget all the complexity that goes into them. There are numerous exploit mitigations in iOS userland, such as sandboxing, ASLR, and code signature requirements that make jailbreaking incredibly difficult.

Cool stuff, I love their twitter apps, and Netbot is really just tweetbot with a grey skin. Course, you’ll need the $36/year app.net membership to use it. However, the scheme of making the best app.net client free is a good scheme, I wish them good luck.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think that BB10 is a nice looking smartphone OS, and their new hardware looks good. But to be a plausible third player in the market they have to not only keep current BB users, attract new smartphone users, but also maybe pull some users from iOS and Android. That’s a tough road, especially when the behemoth Microsoft isn’t even in double digit market share after 2 years.

Great interview with Kim Dotcom. He obviously has an axe to grind, but I think that anyone who doesn’t think that the Megaupload takedown was amped up because of the RIAA/MPAA and their ties to the government is deceiving themselves.

That was in 1936, and there were only four Lykovs then—Karp; his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and Natalia, a daughter who was only 2. Taking their possessions and some seeds, they had retreated ever deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943—and neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their family. All that Agafia and Dmitry knew of the outside world they learned entirely from their parents’ stories. The family’s principal entertainment, the Russian journalist Vasily Peskov noted, “was for everyone to recount their dreams.”

Just imagine how terrified you’d be if someone appeared after you hadn’t seen another soul in decades, with strange devices and technology. Other details like how their language diminished into “blurred cooing” and how they had no replacement for metal (and how cooking became more and more difficult) are fascinating.

Something to think about the next time you think of leaving all technology behind and just living in the woods :)

I spent 4 years doing tech support Back In The Day(tm) supporting a dial up modem pool at the local Real Estate Board, and more than one time I asked the end user to put the phone at the back of the computer so I could hear what the modem was doing. I can still tell if hardware error correction fails or not.

Just discovered MySQLTuner, a very nifty little perl script that will (read-only) analyse your MySQL install and suggest different configuration changes to make it work better. Going to be using this a lot I think.

MySQLTuner is a script written in Perl that allows you to review a MySQL installation quickly and make adjustments to increase performance and stability. The current configuration variables and status data is retrieved and presented in a brief format along with some basic performance suggestions.

Another Song For Ridicule From the "Friday" and "Thanksgiving" Songwriter

… and I use the term ‘songwriter’ loosely. I’m not going to embed the video, but here’s a link to
Tweenchronic-Skip Rope for ridicule. Seems that the writer of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” and “Thanksgiving” is at it again.

Developer preview phones will help make the mobile web more accessible to more people. Developers are critical to the web and to Mozilla’s mission to make the web accessible to everyone. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide use Firefox to discover, experience and connect to the Web. A web based on open standards and open technologies. We couldn’t have done this without web developers. Now we are working on bringing the power of the web to mobile, through Firefox OS, along with all the power of open standards and an open community, and once again, we’d like to invite web developers to join us.

Definitive Proof of Why the Moon Landings Could Have Never EVER Been Faked

You know those friends who still have a tiny bit of doubt about the moon landings in 1969? The ones what whip out random things about carvings on rocks, or shadows not lining up, and how scientists that were involved died mysterious deaths? Yea, we all know at least one.

This video is so good, so incredibly brilliant, solid and simple, that you will want to paste it all over your Facebooks and Twitters just to piss off all the IMBECILES who still claim that the Moon landings were faked.* The reason is simple: the technology to fake it didn’t exist.

The video is good enough to embed right here for your watching pleasure.

Got to see a MaKey MaKey in person last night, thanks to one of the guys at the FV.rb meeting last night.

MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything inbetween[…]

Basically it’s a circuit board with a USB connector to plug into a computer, and it acts as a keyboard. It has several connectors (wsad and up down left right, plus a few others) that when they’re connected, translate into that key being pressed.

What is Graph Search?
Graph Search is a new way for you to find people, photos, places and interests that are most relevant to you on Facebook.

What is Graph Search useful for?
Graph Search will help you instantly find others, learn more about them and make connections, explore photos, quickly find places like local attractions and restaurants, and learn about common interests like music, movies, books and more. All results are unique based on the strength of relationships and connections.

What can I search for?
With Graph Search, you can search for people, photos, places and interests.

When having Big Bird come out during your keynote isn’t the weirdest thing in your key note, you’re doing something… uhm…. something. Seriously, go through the tweets and pictures then watch the video, I can’t believe that this isn’t a parody.

Just watching the video made me feel uncomfortable. I love how there’s no applause or laughs at the carefully crafted breaks (at least they didn’t show up on the edit).

The perspex ‘ice cube’ the photographer was housed in for much of the filming was ‘pretty much bombproof’.
But there was a risk it could get brittle when very cold - making the task of filming the polar bears even more perilous.
He said: ‘There’s no doubt polar bear cubs are the cutest animals in the world and even the adults have an aesthetic which isn’t threatening.

Trust the BBC to remain calm while a 9’ tall man eater is a sheet of perspex away from eating you for dinner.

Saw on C|Net via reddit this morning that Facebook is testing a $1 fee for inbox access. Note that this isn’t for you to send a facebook message to your friend, this is to allow others to message you even if you’re not connected (remember that on facebook only your friends can send you messages).

Translation: “We’re going to allow big companies to pay us a wheelbarrow full of cash to spam you to hell and back.”

This combined with the recently announced auto play video ads coming soon, might be time to drop Facebook. I thought they were making a ton of money already, but I guess greed begets greed begets more ads.

First of all, dammit, I missed this, I was just talking about CaH and even went to the page to show a friend and saw the “pay what you want” as I scrolled by, but never really registered it. Apparently they had a ‘pay what you want’ event and here are the Cards Against Humanity Statistics for what people paid, what they made, and what they did with the money.

Via reddit where we also are shown how envelopes are addressed when you pay $0.

What I saw on twitter was yet another comment from an open source “elite” - a person of high visibility with a project that is well known by tens or hundreds of thousands of people - making fun of someone else trying to contribute. Again. And again. And again. Over and over. And it makes me very very sad.

Amazon has quietly launched the Kindle Store in Canada over the weekend. First spotted by the Digital Reader last Friday, Amazon’s landing page revealed the debut of the Kindle Store to allow Canadians to purchase ebooks with their local account, instead of going through a US portal.

Nice that we now start getting at least a tiny bit of the US gets in terms of Amazon content. You can hit the kindle store directly here.

Microsoft developers on the OS/2 team were promised a week in Hawaii if they got the thing finished and, of course, had share options. IBM tried to compete with a trip to the Azores, which wasn’t quite as good. It was irrelevant anyway because Big Blue’s HR vetoed our prize on the grounds that IBM rules prohibited that many IBMers being on the same aeroplane.

Just discovered the Consultant’s Canary, a nice little script that will print out a report of, well, pretty much everything on a mac system. Very helpful for debugging questions like “why is my my friend’s computer running so slowly?”

Given Microsoft’s slew of new releases that break from the past, like Windows 8, Windows RT, Surface, and Windows Phone 8, these Kin videos seem worth a second look to see why the company so badly needed to start over from scratch. Also? They’re kind of hilarious.

Via a facebook link is a kickstarter project for a Self-Cleaning Fish Tank That Grows Food. Now I’m not a fan of mushrooms at all, but anything that lets me have green things, fish, and not have to do any work to do cleaning? I’m in.

The real rule, if Twitter was honest and direct, is simple: “We don’t permit anyone to exceed the limit unless we feel like it.” But even then, it would be stupid for anyone to build a business on Twitter with such unstable footing. And if your plan is to stay under the 100,000-token limit, you’d be a fool to believe in the safety and longevity of that exemption.

I wonder what happens when a higher visibility client like TweetBot hits the limit? I’m going to guess the same thing.

Ok, my birthday is coming up and I just found the perfect gift for me: Romo - The Smartphone Robot for Everyone. Sure you need a second smartphone to control your smartphone controlled robot, but that’s a small price to pay for a freakin’ personal robot (especially one with that cute a face).

Instead, volunteers couldn’t get the system to work from the field in many states—in some cases because they had been given the wrong login information. The system crashed repeatedly. At one point, the network connection to the Romney campaign’s headquarters went down because Internet provider Comcast reportedly thought the traffic was caused by a denial of service attack.

Sounds like a cluster-fuck of presidential proportions (pun intended), but also one that could have been avoided with more time, testing, and all the other things that IT people ask for but rarely get.

NASA’s Spot the Station service sends you an email or text message a few hours before the space station passes over your house. The space station looks like a fast-moving plane in the sky, though one with people living and working aboard it more than 200 miles above the ground. It is best viewed on clear nights. For more information on the International Space Station and its mission, visit the space station mission pages.

It is an odd relationship with a few companies now share with the so-called “tech press” where rants and complaints aren’t presented as stories, but often as these silly open letters to Apple/Google/Amazon/etc.

I don’t think that his assertion that .com are any less safe or unsafe. If it’s hosted on US servers, I assume that a three letter agency will be able to grab the server, and regardless of it’s domain, if it’s deemed as something against Big Brother, I presume that a three letter agency will be able to sneak into all the main DNS servers and block the domain or TLD.

Cool stuff from my buddies over at 500px… they have teamed up with Blurb to allow you to produce photo books directly from your 500px account.

Great news everyone! We’ve teamed up with Blurb to make your upgrade experience even better. Now when you upgrade to Awesome or Plus membership you get a complimentary Blurb gift code - $25 worth for Plus upgrade and $50 for Awesome upgrade. That’s like getting a membership for free :)

Square Canada Launches With Free Mobile Card Readers. If you’re not familiar with Square, it’s a personal point of sale system that lets anyone with the reader and an iPhone to take credit card payments. Think Craigslist transactions, friends that owe you money, etc. Glad to see it’s finally hit Canada.

Ever think your dreams aren’t big enough? I certainly think that now after seeing The Full Scale Millennium Falcon Project, a project to build, you guessed it, a full scale copy of the Millennium Falcon.

Anatomy of a Hoax is a great look through how someone created a non-existant phone, the Sony Nexus X, and brought it into the world (virtually) and “got” pretty much all the major tech publications, wasting about 1500 hours collectively. Very interesting to see just how little work is required to put a hoax like this out there.

As far as I know, nothing of any notable significance occurred on Monday, October 15, 2012. The social web was still abuzz from the spectacular achievement in human ingenuity from the night before, brought to you by Red Bull and science. People continued to predictably politick and Rainn Wilson did an AMA. However, for an infinitesimal segment of the human population, October 15th was marked by a frenetic search for answers fueled by an anxiety that can only come from leaked photos of an up-and-coming piece of shiny new tech.

In the article Outlawed by Amazon DRM, probably the worst of all cases of DRM is exposed. This is the sort of thing that gets your Open Source friends will use as a prime example of why DRM is bad, and quite frankly, they’re right.

The short version is a friend of the author had her Kindle wiped and her Amazon account closed with no explanation and no recourse. Talking to Amazon was like talking to a brick wall in terms of either a) getting it reversed or b) figuring out why.

“The communication between the load balancer and the virtual servers is encrypted. So even if a cloud provider found out they’re running TPB, they can’t look at the content of user traffic or user’s IP-addresses.”

Most of the big sites and writers seem to be based on the US, and forget that their favourite music/tv/movie provider may not be available to everyone. The Amazon tablet might be the best thing in the world, but as a Canadian I don’t have access to any of it’s movies, TV, or music content. Ditto with things like Google Music. This might be part of the Apple success, while people in the US can turn their nose up at the company (or not, depending on which side of the fence you’re on), and wonder why the world loves Apple so much, looking at the charts it’s easy to see why. The music coverage of Apple vs the rest is pretty amazing, and that combined with them being able to launch new phones simultaneously in 20-30 countries on launch day is pretty impressive.

However once you get down a bit farther into Apps and eBooks, things get more even. Still a very interesting look at the world’s access to “content” when you’re not in the US, also known as the center of the Universe.

I don’t think the chances of surviving an ejection at Mach 3.18 and seventy-eight thousand eight hundred feet were very good. However, g-forces built up so rapidly that my words came out garbled and unintelligible, as confirmed later by the cockpit voice recorder.

Earlier this year, Jordan Mechner, the creator of such games as Karateka, The Last Express, and Prince of Persia, was sent a box of old material from his father’s closet. In it was the original source code to Prince of Persia for the Apple II, a 1989 game he’d sold after years of work. The only problem was, he had no idea how he could rescue it from the fading floppy disks. In a fast-paced storytelling atmosphere, computer historian Jason Scott talks about how that source code was rescued, what it means to bring something lost back from the shadows, and what lessons can be learned from the process.

I’ve spent the last 10 years using to-do lists, and you know what? I’m absolutely EXHAUSTED from them. It’s time to stop using them.

I understand that for some people starting a to-do list can be beneficial (especially if you happen to have chaotic organisational skills). To-do lists can certainly help focus and structure the insanity … for a while at least.

I’m going to switch to starting each day by just doing what I feel like I want to do. That can be a bit scary and overwhelming initially, but eventually I believe I’ll get used to the sudden mental freedom.

I’m not sure if something like this would work, however I know I have a Todo list on the front page of my iPhone with 7 undone items that has been staring at me and guilting me for the last year or more.

I’m not a very manly man, not into rebuilding engines or chopping down trees, but watching and listening to the video of an F1 Car in the Lincoln Tunnel I have to admit it turned me on in a very manly way.

Wow, 30 years. I didn’t know just how crazy expensive it was when it first came out, but then again, I suppose any new technology is stupidly expensive when it first comes out (case in point, iPhone version 1, the first BluRay players, the first DVD players, the first personal computers, etc).

The Big Picture has some great images Revealing more of North Korea. A very cool look, and not slanted (as previous “revealing insights” have been) in the “hey look at how there are pictures of Dear Leader everywhere and these people are living in the past”. Just a bunch of normal people doing normal things in normal looking places.

TorrentFreak has the story about Megabox, teased by Kim Dotcom. It seems to be a new music sharing / production / something service with the goal of kicking the asses of the old school music industry.

Kim Dotcom is determined to put the major music labels out of business with Megabox. At the same time he promises to give artists full control over their own work and a healthy revenue stream. Today Dotcom released a video on the making of Megabox which unveils some of the service’s features. The video also shows “The Black Keys,” “Rusko,” “Two Fingers” and “Will.i.am” as exclusive artists.

From the video it definitely looks very cool, I can’t wait to see what results!

French tourist Nathalie Rollandin came across a camera-happy seagull recently. She was visiting the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, when she set her GoPro camera down while its was recording. Before she knew it, the camera was being carried away in the mouth of an artsy gull. Once the bird was a safe distance away, it set the camera down and recorded some beautiful footage of itself flying away into the sunset.

I’m not convinced this isn’t a cunning PR move by GoPro Inc., but even if not, it’s impressive. The gopro freefall from 12500 feet without case is due to it being bumped at the door of the plane by a skydiver, and then it filmed it’s own freefall to the ground, where it survived just fine.

From the YouTube description:

bumped my head on the door frame on exit unclasping the latch on the box. The camera popped out on exit at 12.500 and fell straight down onto the landing area at the DZ and was recovered by a fellow skydiver. It even caught our landings. Not one scratch on the body or lens. Still can’t believe that I got it back and that it is totally fine. A buddy the same day who is one of our camera flyers had the same thing happen but with his SLR….not the same result. I’m definitely a gopro fan for life these little guys are bomb proof

So Flightradar24.com is the coolest thing I’ve seen so far today (granted, the day is young). It’s exactly what it sounds like, a mashup of google maps and flight tracking in real time, allowing you to see as planes move across the map (I assume this is all projected data based on departure / arrival times and not true “real time tracking”). Very cool. Want to freak out? Zoom out over Europe and see how England basically disappears completely under a mass of aircraft.

At 8:46 AM, in New York City and at the White House in Washington DC, there was a moment of silence to remember when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In New York, the NYPD, FDNY, Port Authority Police and the families of the victims were present, while in Washington the President and the First Lady led the moment.

The cable networks all carried it, with ABC’s “Good Morning America” and “CBS This Morning” carrying it as well. The only national general news program to not carry the moment of silence was NBC’s ‘Today,” which, in an odd bit of counter-programming, opted to air an interview with “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” star Kris Jenner, who talked about the new season of the reality show, and her breast implants.

It’s hard to imagine that after only one season of playing the now iconic character, Nichols actually considered quitting the show because she felt Uhura didn’t have enough to do. “I thought she was a glorified telephone operator in space,” she once said, before she was famously convinced to continue doing the show by none other than Dr. Martin Luther King himself. “Dr. King was a big fan of the show,” Nichols told me. “He felt it was important that children of all races see an African American female appearing on television as an equal.”
“Meanwhile, the NBC guys keep talking to the director about how the station affiliates in the South might react, which just made us all the more tense.”

In the end they were asked to do a kiss and kissless version, and William Shatner to his credit, apparently sabotaged the kissless version, forcing NBC to air the (at that time, 1968) completely shocking and unheard of act of a white man kissing a black woman on TV.

One can only hope that this sort of fear is long gone, or will be soon, and we (the collective viewership and media moguls in general) can start worrying about things that actually matter.

An aside, my favorite story about Nichelle Nicols is her influence on Whoopi Goldberg, found here (at almost the bottom of the page) upon seeing a woman of color on the TV in a position of power.

For the record, I think it’s a whole lot of misunderstandings all around and while I’ve never met Marco, I love Instapaper and respect him for what he does not only in his blogging but his other projects as well.

Our friends over at Productive Outs let us know about this, one of the more astounding things of the many bizarre ones we’ve seen in McCovey Cove. It’s a DeLorean DMC-12 hovercraft, live and in action.

Update: We spoke with a Nokia spokesperson who agrees that the PureView ad is misleading. They stressed that it was “never the company’s intention to deceive anyone,” but only to demonstrate the benefits of optical image stabilization. Nokia says it’s now looking into updating the original video with a footnote so that it’s clear that the images are simulated, and the original Nokia Conversations blog post that announced the video has been updated with the following text: “the OIS video, above, was not shot using the Lumia 920.”

To be fair, the fact that any ad on TV demonstrating anything isn’t “fake”, done in completely controlled conditions, or is all CGI should be of no surprise to anyone. Biggest advantage of HDTV these days is that you can actually read the fine print like: “screen sequences shorted”, “images simulated”, “lashes enhanced in post production”, etc.

On the Wolfram|Alpha Blog there’s news about their Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook, which requires you to connect the WA app to your facebook account and then it number-crunches down all your facebook history. Pretty amazing to see.

Today, we are giving control of Diaspora to the community.
As a Free Software social project, we have an obligation to take this project further, for the good of the community that revolves around it. Putting the decisions for the project’s future in the hands of the community is one of the highest benefits of any FOSS project, and we’d like to bring this benefit to our users and developers. We still will remain as an important part this community as the founders, but we want to make sure we are including all of the people who care about Diaspora and want to see it succeed well into the future.

Or if I were to translate “we have no idea how to make this work so we’re making it open source. Rings a bell somehow.

I have the best of hopes, but honestly Diaspora didn’t have a hope from the start, they got a metric shit-tonne of money (that’s how I measure things) because everyone hated facebook, but just couldn’t deliver. They had some interesting ideas, but no hope of “beating” facebook.

RIP Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon. First man on the fucking moon. Seriously, assuming you’re not a conspiracy theorist who thinks it’s a sound stage, how epic is that? In honor of this, LIFE has republished their Apollo 11: To the Moon and Back edition.

Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon, died on August 25, 20012. In honor of his life and career, LIFE.com is republishing the page spreads — and, in effect, the entire issue — of LIFE magazine’s famous August 11, 1969, special edition, “To the Moon and Back.” For millions of people who witnessed the Apollo 11 mission, watching on television or following it on the radio as humanity improbably, marvelously, actually walked on the moon, the event perhaps did not feel quite real until, more than two weeks later, LIFE published its definitive account of the epic journey.

If you’re not five years old, and dumb, exposure to the Furby is about as bad as smallpox spores. The gimmick quickly wears off, and it’s then a constant, gnawing source of aggravation. It’s like a device designed specifically to annoy. In that sense, it’s sort of brilliant, in the same way a crossbow is a brilliant way to shoot an arrow through someone’s neck.

On the software side: Samsung desperately wants to develop the next version of Android themselves, but they lack the technical ability, vision, ecosystem support, and design chops to make it happen. They want to add features, and maybe even have a good idea or two, but they just can’t execute those ideas in a way that makes them good. Split screen, for instance, needed to be a core OS function, but it’s clearly a hack that was tacked on at the UI layer. It’s a bunch of tricks that look like split screen, but you’re never really running 2 apps at once.

You know what’s awful about YouTube videos? Sure you do! Annotations are awful. Because more often than not, they’re less “annotation” and more “HEYDIDYOULIKETHIS?!!? SUBSCRIBE NOW BUY ON ITUNES!!!!!” Most of you probably click off annotations (and to a lesser degree captions) nearly every time you watch a YouTube video. Do yourself a favor and turn them off for good, right now.

Twitter has been broadcasting for quite some time that it would be making changes to the API that developers use to access it for apps and today the company is finally beginning to detail what those changes are. First and foremost, developers who create apps that perform traditional 3rd party Twitter client functions (like Tweetbot) will be limited to 100,000 users total before the developer must get “permission” and/or “work with [Twitter] directly.” Current apps will be able to continue to function as normal, however once their “user tokens” double whatever they are today, these new restrictions will apply. Essentially, once any 3rd party app hits its user limit, the developer will need to have a “come to Twitter” moment at which something will happen, and the most likely scenario is that the app simply won’t be able to take on more users.

In essence, twitter wants to control the twitter experience for the end user, and cut out 3rd party developers who create new clients who may or may not mimic the current UI, or may make it better. Of course, they also want to make sure that the display is strictly controlled, as noted by Gruber in the display guidelines. This will of course mean that twitter won’t be letting any clients that do things like say, remove “promoted tweets”, slim down the rapidly-getting-bloated web UI, or do things like create a better twitter UI.

In their rules for the number of clients, they are also essentially limiting the max amount of money that a developer can earn making a twitter client (100,000-200,000 * $), making it unattractive to pour development efforts into a twitter client, and of course that’s a good thing for twitter.

Dear America… the people who put out this sort of Government “Run Hide Fight” Videos are part of the reasons that you are mocked. This video seriously sounds like something out of the book 1984. I’m not as offended by the implication that people “taking suspicious pictures” are terrorists as the idiocy of it all.

I say fight back against the idiocy. Report everything. See someone leave their car to run in and get a coke? Report it. See someone wearing jeans on a day when the temperature is over 20C? Report them. See someone you’ve never seen before near your building? REPORT THEM.

I can’t help but say something along the lines of “10 years, yea, that’s not too bad I guess” :) Of course, I have a feeling that Mr. Gruber has done a hell of a lot better with his ten years than I have with my 13….

Lead TextMate developer Allan Odgaard’s decision yesterday to open source the code for the long-awaited version 2.0 was met with a lot of criticism. Ars readers chimed in via comments, our Open Forum, and Twitter, questioning Odgaard’s motives and slamming his current choice of GPLv3 license.
We spoke to Odgaard hoping to clear the air on the matter, though he wasn’t very confident that his explanations would “affect public perception of the project.” However, he was adamant that his decision to open source TextMate 2.0 was not a sign that he was giving up on the now six-year-long endeavor to build a new version from scratch.

Good news that Pinterest is finally out of invite-only mode, and you no longer have to wait for an invite to get on the site (not that it seems to have taken that long for people).

For those of you who haven’t joined Pinterest yet, this means you can sign up without waiting for an invite: all you have to do is go to Pinterest.com to get started. In addition to using your Facebook or Twitter login, we’re also opening registration so you can sign up with just your email address.

Looking forward to seeing how well the site handles the no-doubt huge influx of new users.

While it's not a new image from the Mars Curiosity rover, this MARS Greeley Haven 360 Panorama is still pretty damn impressive to see. I can't wait to see what comes from the newer tech and better cameras :) From the 'about this image':

This is the latest panorama released by NASA July 2012. It was assembled from 817 images taken between Dec. 21, 2011, and May 8, 2012, while Opportunity was stationed on an outcrop informally named 'Greeley Haven'. on a segment of the rim of ancient Endeavour Crater.

Ever since he first rolled into our lives back in 2008, we’ve loved WALL-E, the lovable trash compactor robot at the heart of the Pixar film of the same name. He’s cute, he’s loving, he’s brave, and he’s just plain neat. Too bad he’s only a cartoon, right? Well, not anymore.

Gizmodo has the story of how David Pogue Has Lost His iPhone. He announced it via a tweet several hours ago) and Gizmodo has been scouring as much information as they can, posting shots of the house where the phone is from google maps, contacting police, etc.

New York Times technology writer David Pogue has lost his iPhone. He has posted a screenshot of where it might be on Lockerz.com, though. Won’t anyone help him find it?

On July 20, we announced that we were turning Digg back into a startup and rebuilding it from scratch in six weeks. After an intense month and a half, we managed to get the new Digg up and running on a fresh code base and infrastructure. We now have a solid foundation on which to build, and we expect to build fast. Yesterday, we previewed the new Digg applications for web, iPhone, and mobile web and today we’re happy to share Digg v1.

The new new digg has a google plus / pinterest vibe going on, combined with a minimalist, almost Windows 8 feel. The question is, is it enough to re-launch digg as “relevant” or has it now lost any forward momentum at all and will revert back to a once great, but now struggling to reclaim it’s glory, website.

Time will tell. I loved the pre-new Digg v4 and I have hopes that the new new digg will do as well!

Great conversation about email the the long term viability of online resources such as FourSquare and Facebook. Emails to My Unborn Daughter is not the “Dear Sophie” google ad that you might be thinking of, but instead a real person who has been sending emails to his son for the last 5 years.

For the past five years, I’ve been writing emails to my son. Shortly after he was born in 2007, I created an email account in his name so I could write to him throughout his childhood and then turn the account over to him when he was of age. Upon opening the account for the first time, he’d be greeted with an archive of his childhood as seen through his father’s eyes.

My buddy Khensu pointed out that tomorrow is Sysadmin Day! While I joked that sysadmins consider the normal day to day abuse as love, seriously, take a second to appreciate that without the neckbeard you keep in the basement you wouldn’t be able to:

On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They’d marked the spot “Ground Zero. Population 5” on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them.

Not sure what’s bigger, their balls or the tumors no doubt growing in their brains… :)

Well, I wasn’t expecting to see this, but I was browsing r/askreddit today and found this thread asking people about how long it’s taken for “Karma” to kick in (ie: getting asked for a job by someone who used to bully you).

My buddy Aryk pointed me to this video from Australia’s Got Talent: George & Noriko who are buskers who play…. “fusion music” is about as cloase as I can describe it. Really it has to be seen to be believed:

I’d argue that the last truly revolutionary version of Windows was Windows 95. In the subsequent 17 years, we’ve seen a stream of mostly minor and often inconsequential design changes in Windows - at its core, you’ve got the same old stuff: a start menu, a desktop with icons, taskbar at the bottom, overlapping windows, toolbars, and pull-down menus.

Software patents will not be granted under any possible circumstance; software is code, code is written, writing is protected by copyright, and that’s all the protection it needs. All existing software patents will be declared invalid. This will not be done ‘actively’ (i.e., there will not be groups of clerks sifting through granted patents), but rather, ‘passively’; software patents are simply declared invalid, so if someone brings them to court, they will be tossed out immediately. Within 15 years, the system will be purged of all software patents either by the courts, or simply by patents expiring.

Great post on Moving from OhLife to Day One if you happen to be doing this like I am. OhLife is a nifty online journalling tool, and Day One is a nifty cloud-synced Mac desktop/iOS journalling tool. If you happen to want to go from one to the other, here’s a nifty little perl script to help you do it.

As I mentioned on the phone, my apologies and it should not have happened. By the way, if any of your readers (or their readers or colleagues or friends or whatever) experiences what you saw on your video, just contact us or ping me directly (tom@drobo.com) and we will take care of it immediately.

Tom responds well. I almost wish that my now-several-year-old Drobo version 1 was having massive issues so that I could call them up and see if I got similar love. Of course, it’s stubbornly hanging in there, though has been relegated to backup only, due to it’s slow transfer speed (caused by the USB2 connection) compared to my less cool, but gig-e connected DNS-323.

Although nothing is certain until cash is in the bank, Microsoft’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Yammer looks pretty much like a done deal. VentureBeat asked some industry analysts and experts what they think this deal will do to Yammer, Microsoft, and the enterprise social networking industry as a whole.

Saw this morning on the Meetup HQ Blog that for their 10th anniversary they’ll send a winner to any meetup anywhere, which I have to admit, is pretty cool. Who wouldn’t want to attend the Atlantis Photo meetup or the Martian Capital City Rails meetup?

Just RSVP and attend a local Meetup happening between now and July 15th, and you are automatically entered to win. We’ll cover the cost of the winner’s hotel and airfare up to $5,000.
You can enter up to five times by going to five different Meetups — but of course, you have to RSVP and attend the Meetups to win. Get all the rules below.

Cool deal, if you’re looking for image scanning services, you can get a deal with ScanCafe through 1000memories which gets the price down to $0.19/scan for 1000+ scans. Included is saving the images to your 1000 memories “shoebox” account.

Thanks to my buddy Bryan for sending me over this video of Mister Rogers Remixed. Great stuff. Funnily enough I never watched Mr. Rogers as a kid, but the more I learn about Fred Rogers the more I admire him.

In an effort to return the company to its glory days, Hurd had just finished trimming as much fat as he possibly could and he knew that HP’s cash cow — the printer business — wouldn’t last forever. He was looking to grow businesses that had a future, and he understood that mobile was a keystone to that strategy. And Bradley may have had a soft spot for Palm — he’d left it several years prior to join HP, so he had a healthy understanding for the company, its challenges, and what it had been through.

Nice to see someone has gotten around to making a Zombie Apocalypse Google Map. Gonna keep an eye on this, and head north to Alaska where it’s cold, far from Florida (you had to know that this shit would start in Florida), and is full of crazy Americans with guns. Just sayin’.

Starting today you’ll begin to notice a simplified Twitter bird. From now on, this bird will be the universally recognizable symbol of Twitter. (Twitter is the bird, the bird is Twitter.) There’s no longer a need for text, bubbled typefaces, or a lowercase “t” to represent Twitter.

Great 7 minute video from PBS on The Culture Of Reddit. As a reddit user I was hoping for more in depth (ie: dwelving into some of the awesome users like Shitty Watercolour or Reactiononmy_nub, but it’s still a pretty great look at how this awesome website is as awesome as it is.

After experiencing its fair share of setbacks, SpaceX has finally done it. At 3:44 a.m. EDT, the company successfully launched its Dragon capsule into low Earth orbit atop its towering Falcon 9 rocket. In doing so, it has become the first private company in history to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station.

Really wish there was some explanation about this, Gruber was a staple of the 5by5 network and the “new” Talk Show sounds (from the first few minutes anyway) similar to the old show. I’d expect at least a note about what happened from one of them, even if the parting was bad.

Many of you were around for last year’s Dropquest, where we sent y’all on a magical journey through Dropbox and the interwebs. Wordokus were solved, music puzzles were deciphered, origami cranes were folded, and dragons were slain. All in all, nearly half a million Dropquesters were rewarded for their craftiness, skill, and effort. That was well over a year ago, and since then we’ve been holding our cards and toiling away to craft a Dropquest successor worthy of the first.

Ever wish you owned an exotic supercar? Now you can with XLR8! Pronounced as “accelerate”, XLR8 is a super cool iOS app from 2XL Games that makes your car sound like an exotic supercar as you drive (via FSM). The universal app for iPhone / iPod touch and iPad uses your device’s GPS and accelerometer to track your speed, braking, and cornering and convert that data into the sounds of a gas-guzzling V-8 through the speakers of your car (requires audio connection). The app even lets you unlock engine sounds produced by Ferrari, Lamborghini, a NASCAR vehicle, and a Ford GT40 via in-app purchases.

I know it’s completely useless, but I’m so tempted to spend the $0.99 on this.

Interesting post on ZDNet on how little adoption the new .xxx TLD has gotten. You’d think that these would be now a hotbed of porn, but it seems that only about 133,000 adult domains were registered under .xx, and of those only 27,555 are actually developed. I know that 28k is a lot, but compared to the rest of the domain world, that’s nothing. Expected for something like a .bob or .arcterex domain, but .xxx?

It’s a good proposition for a company desperate to get high quality apps like those on iOS and Android, because I think that good apps do matter (just look at the flack that Microsoft has gotten over the crappy Metro apps included with Windows 8 Dev and Consumer previews). However the question really is, who is going to hitch their wagon to that sinking ship?

Awesome article by Jeff onBooks: Bits vs. Atoms, all about how eBooks are better (and worse) than physical books.

More specifically, so many beautiful ideas have been helplessly trapped in physical made-of-atoms books for the last few centuries. How do books suck? Let me count the ways[….]

One thing missed in the ‘how much do they cost’ section is the reason my… uhm… “frugal” parents gave for buying physical books. You can get them for a quarter at a garage sale, which pretty much nukes even the best (legal) price for an ebook out of the water by about 2000x.

Great post by Mr. Fry called Four and Half Years On about his time with the iPhone, and some reflections of smartphones in general, not all with kind words.

In mid to late 2007 the Redmond Behemoth had just come up with Windows Mobile 6 for Pocket PCs, as they charmingly called their absolutely fucking dog of an operating system. Pardon the language, but nothing else will do. CEO Steve Ballmer and others at MS were the first to admit it when they launched Windows Phone 7 a year and a half ago […]

If you’re not familiar with 1km (as I like to call them), it’s a “shoeboxing” site where the idea is you are over at Aunt Martha’s and see some old family photos in an album. You don’t have time to do a full proper scan of them, but you have the shoebox app on your phone and whip it out, take pictures of the images (and if you have a decently new phone and good lighting conditions, these probably will be adequate, and the app helps with nice intuitive cropping and filtering). Images are stored forever through a partnership with the Internet Archive. More info on the 1000 memories.com about page.

I have to admit I was sceptical of this Student-created “Bing Automatic” app concept (which essentially uses data you’ve already written or the context of your browser or document or selection to auto-search for you)… then about halfway through I thought “wow, that is pretty cool”.

First and foremost, “Bing Automatic” is a completely conceptual idea envisioned by what appears to be a team of marketing students for a college coursework assignment, so apply a generous coating of salt. I’m not even sure if Microsoft’s Bing team has seen this.

Of course, as described in the concept video, it’s a privacy nightmare waiting to happen, and frankly I think that Google should take this idea and run with it, as they have been pushing the “we’re a decision engine too” idea.

Still, ignoring the multitude of privacy problems with this, if it were to work and be created as shown, it’d be a pretty cool program (and frankly the search engine behind it is completely irrelevant, so it could be Bing, Google, Ask, Wolfram Alpha, etc.).

The face transplant recipient, 37-year-old Richard Lee Norris of Hillsville, Virginia, was injured in 1997 in a gun accident. Since that time, he has undergone multiple life-saving and reconstructive surgeries. Due to the accident, Mr. Norris lost his lips and nose and had limited movement of his mouth. Mr. Norris first came to the University of Maryland Medical Center in 2005 to discuss reconstructive options with Dr. Rodriguez.

Wow, looking at the before and after images (slightly disturbing) show what an amazing age of medicine we live in today.

Shared out by my buddy James of RainGeek fame, here’s 5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women. Not sure I agree with them all, but it’s a compelling argument, especially #4, concerning the comments made about fucking supreme court justice Elena Kagan, the fourth female Justice1 (I presume by other women, but that’s just how I read it).

OMG I want this so much. Amazing that this is being built by juniors in high school. When I was that age I wasn’t even thinking about girls, I think I was probably still more concerned with riding my bike or something like that. Really glad to see these guys have almost doubled their required $2,500 goal.

We recently began testing Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts on iOS and Android devices to make it easier for brands to reach consumers anytime, even when they are on the go. As with the launch of Promoted Tweets in user timelines on Twitter.com, we started by showing them in the timeline only for those users already following the advertiser. Since we began testing three weeks ago, reactions have been positive. Starting today, we are expanding this test, enabling brands to target Promoted Tweets to mobile users that share similar interests with their existing followers.

I try not to pimp my own stuff here a lot, but I did write up an article on Managing Photography using Evernote over the weekend. Have a read and let me know what you think, and even if you’re not a photographer, model, or creative in anyway, Evernote is an awesome product and everyone should use it!

Pilot Felix Baumgartner of Austria seen before his jump at the first manned test flight for Red Bull Stratos in Roswell, New Mexico, USA on March 15 2012. In this test he reach the altitude 21800 meters (71500 ft) and landed safely near Roswell.

The results were conclusive. Women—both Europeans and Polynesians—said that the men looked significantly more attractive when clean-shaven. They also reported that bearded men looked older and of higher social status. When men were asked to look at the same photographs, they reported that bearded men looked more aggressive.

Macgasm reports that Oink is dead. Oink is a social network / recommendation app for the iPhone that was the first product from Kevin Rose’s startup incubator Milk.

Kevin Rose told All Things D, “We started Milk Inc. (the company behind Oink) to rapidly build and test out new ideas. Oink was our first test and, in preparing to move onto the next project, we’ve decided to shut it down to help focus our efforts.” Clearly that’s PR speak for “no one was using our application, and it’s not profitable.” Had Oink been profitable, there’s no way they would be closing down the application and service so quickly. It just wouldn’t happen. Don’t let the PR speak fool you, Oink was a major disappointment.

I used Oink a tiny bit and while it was an interesting take on checkin/social networking, it just didn’t do it for me, and it sounds like it was a similar story for the rest of the users. Hopefully we’ll still see good stuff come from Kevin and his gang.

As the tech people know, as a fundraiser for the new studio, TWiT sold bricks with your choice of inscription on them. Now we get our first look at the The TWiT Brick Wall Of Honor via some pretty cool Gigapan images.

Shooting Time Lapses In Pennsylvania? Have A Reason Or Get Busted apparently. Great video showing both unreasonable cops (hopefully the exception not the rule) and a reasonable photographer (again, hopefully the rule not the exception). Sadly it turns out even if you’re in the right and know the law it still doesn’t mean anything when you’re up against the ones who can arrest you and have the guns. Related to the recent strobist post.

Nice little Behind The Scenes video of The Lies Behind the Lens looking at photographers shooting those before and after images for things like diet pills etc.

Check out this clip from, “Bigger Faster Stronger”, where photographer Rich Schaff explains how some companies hire him to take before and after photos on the same day, for misleading supplement advertisements. Is this why some photographers get into photography? Is this even legal? I mean, how far are you willing to go to make a buck? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to disparage shooters who make a living doing this type of work but is this the kind of thing shooters actually aspire towards? Why did you get into photography? Is there anything you won’t shoot? What would it take for you to hang up your lens? I’d really like to hear answers to some of these questions from our readers. So please leave your comments, thoughts and rants below.

Short story (and you, my audience, are smart people so you know this already) - the camera lies not only through “legal” means (lighting, posing, etc) but also through good old photoshop. Some of the before and after images were even taken on the same day. So yea, don’t be stupid and believe advertising :)

Joining Dobbs to discuss the insidious liberal plot to use popular forms of entertainment to educate and enlighten the leaders of tomorrow are three right-wing radio show hosts. Wow, what a shining panel of “experts.” After Dobbs and his sniveling yes men finished laughing and shaking their heads at the latest antics of liberal Hollywood they all went over to Lou’s house for a sleepover with Rick Santorum.

Seriously America, it’s this sort of bullshit that makes the rest of the world laugh at you.

Keeping time for 10,000 years isn’t tricky just because its hard to build a really durable clock. It also forces us to recognize and account for changes in things we normally think of as immutable, like the length of a day.

Everything is a Remix Part 4 has been released. If you haven’t watched the previous 3 episodes, you should, right now. It’s a fascinating look at how ideas and things are created and transformed, from music to lightbulbs.

Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path” and repeated the experiment and I got the same result - my address book was in Path’s hands.

The reasoning behind it is obvious, those notes you might get saying something like “your friend blah blah has joined Path, would you like to friend them?” is only possible if they know who your friends are. Even so, not cool without disclosure. Course, I’m sure that there are a ton of other apps that do this exact same thing, just we don’t know about it.

This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!

TorrentFreak has more details, basically the legal actions against other sites prompted them to shut down, even though they were never directly involved in any sort of legal action. This is too bad, they were my go-to site for any sort of file sharing for years now, and it’s sad that all the BS lately has prompted their shutdown.

This film reaffirms why I believe the iPhone is the single most amazing tool ever - in the palm of your hand you have a digital darkroom with an astonishing array of inspiring post-production tools. In one device you have a camera, post-production editing suite, and music production studio. If you hit a creative mental roadblock, you can relax with a game of Angry Birds.

Doesn’t that look like a disgusting thing? It’s so disgusting it becomes good! And actually, if you think about it, the Alien Brain Hemorrhage Cocktail seems rather complicated to make. That is, if you base it on the looks of the drink. (Then again, I am no bartender, so I really have no idea.)

While the initial goal was $2,000, TheLake posted an update: “Over $9,000 and I’m in a state of shock.” The next update showed Reddit users contributing a total of $11,000. Donations continued to pour in through the organization’s website, Longonot Education Initiative, was upgraded to a Pro account for two years from its host, Weebly. The company also donated $10,000.

[...] 4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that's mysterious -- clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the "now." Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.)

According to mashable the spnKiX motorized shoes are now a reality, thanks to their kickstarter campaign. The fact they raised $71k astounds me, if only because I find it hard to believe that that many people are potentially going to be actually using these things in real life. I can't wait.

Have the "new new" Facebook timeline but don't have the photo chops to put up a super-awesome cover image? DB is giving away a few Free Facebook Cover Images to get you started with an epic cover image for your facebook timeline.

A man in California is being sued for $340,000 by his former employer. What did he do? This isn't a case of bringing home the stapler from his cubicle. After resigning from the company, he took his Twitter followers with him--all 17,000 of them.

Bruce Schneier's exasperation is informed by his job-related need to spend a lot of time in Airportland. He has 10 million frequent-flier miles and takes about 170 flights a year; his average speed, he has calculated, is 32 miles and hour. "The only useful airport security measures since 9/11," he says, "were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can't break in, positive baggage matching"--ensuring that people can't put luggage on planes, and then not board them --"and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater."

The Icon Handbook is a great site with all sorts of information about the new book from Jon Hicks. Also of note is the awesome scalable website (try resizing the browser window down to smartphone width and watch how everything resizes and rearranges appropriately).

But Wait...There's More is a great article over on the Farnam Street blog (great design btw, check out what happens when you resize your browser thinner to smartphone width). You'll never look at infomercials the same, or advertising in general.

Found the Sick Trailer for the New GoPro HD Hero2 over on F-Stoppers. Makes me realize just how boring a life I lead, and I'm hoping that if I were to get one of these little helmet mounted cams I'd spend my day base jumping, flying in a plane, swimming with sexy girls, and travelling to exotic locations.

That said this video needs to be played at 1080p and full screen on the biggest monitor you have.

The Twitter Blog has the scoop on Twitter Stories, a way for people to tell a story behind a single tweet. Similar to Storify it looks like. Has potential though, looking forward to seeing where this goes.

My god, could they make the future look any less boring? Setting up role based authentication?! Hazzaa! That's exciting! OMG you can use your own (blackberry) device?! The future is here now!Facetime Video communication between smartphones and desktop!? What brave and unbelievable future is this now!!

Seriously, a "future vision" video that has a large chunk dedicated to what happens if your phone is stolen and the smiling IT guy doing a remote wipe of it? Where's the excitement, where's the coolness? I know that it's probably more like the future than a lot of other of these "future vision" videos, but yea gods, give it a bit of life!

Course, those who manage large infrastructures full of people in suits carrying blackberries are going to be very excited about this :)

Just wanted to say that I just became a backer of the MobileMount a Suction Cup Mount & Kickstand for Phones/Tablets on Kickstarter. They are within $200 of their goal of $20,000 and I'm more than happy to say that based on what I've seen, it's a nice little project that will fix the "man I wish I had a way to have my phone GPS work while I'm driving" thing. It's just a mount (not power/audio), but for a mere $25 pledge, there's no way to lose. Grab one yourself!

Update: And 20 minutes later they hit the $20,000 goal, though I doubt somehow I was a huge amount of help :) Looking forward to getting my MobileMount though :)

The Wunderkit show is about to start from 6Wunderkinder, the company that produces the excellent cross platform task list application Wunderlist. Wunderkit is to help organize as and it appears that the task list is the first step towards this. Information on the page is a little light, but looking at the screen shots it looks likes a fully formed task / calendar / collaboration and note taking system (probably).

Real-Time reports are available in the new version of Google Analytics, and administrators with Analytics accounts will get Real-Time reports. Google turned the new feature on Thursday for "a number of you," John Jersin, product manager at Google Analytics wrote on the Google Analytics blog.

It hasn't shown up on my analytics dashboard yet, has it for anyone else?

A coworker pointed me to the Pixel Qi display technology and lamented Amazon not utilizing this in their tablet. Pixel Qi allows switching from "normal" LCD mode to a low power, sunlight readable setup (sort of like e-ink, but not). Unfortunately while they did get an investment from 3M recently, I haven't heard of them. The tech looks awesome though, hopefully we'll see it utilized in some e-reader/tablet hybrids soon.

The Macromates blog has been updated with the first (I think) news about the next version of the much loved Mac text editor Textmate. What's Next says there will be a public alpha release this year, before Christmas (for registered users).

I really wonder how much of this is in response to the (apparent) slew of users dropping textmate for BBEdit and Vim as it has appeared that work on the much anticipated 2.0 (talked about as far back as 2006) was never coming and people were jumping ship to an editor that is being developed and doesn't have the danger of a) not supporting newer OSs and b) muscle memory being "wasted" on software that is EOL.

Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of netflix, posted a letter on the netflix blog called An Explanation and Some Reflections regarding the whole streaming / DVD split mess that they've been dealing with over the last few months.

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming, and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. I'll try to explain how this happened.
[...]

Holy cow. This is a straightforward factual question, and the correct answer is something in the neighborhood of 98%.1 But even among Democrats, only 42% think that most climate scientists believe global warming is happening. It's even worse among the other groups.

It wouldn't be so bad if America wasn't so polarized politically, and so influential in the world.

Kudos to Shawn Blanc for pointing out ifttt (if this then that), a pretty cool website service that simplifies some pretty complex interactions. It's hard to explain so hit the previous link, or check out their blog for more information about the beginnings as well.

Credit this morning goes to my boss, John, for pointing me to NiceKicks.com with a story about some shoes that Nike is apparently going to be announcing today. Normally I'd say "you realize I don't care about shoes right? Mine have holes in them [sadly this is a literal and not figurative statement] and you can tell by the rest of my appearance day to day that I can't care less about fashion."

However he then pointed me to the link.

"Welcome to Los Angeles. If my calculations are correct, over the next 24 hours you are about to see some SERIOUS SH*T!"

The images and contents of the box that the reporter got indicate that Nike may be announcing a "back to the future" shoe of some sort, either in throwback style or (pleasepleaseplease) the self-tying shoes from the movie.

Cool social experiment with a starbucks card online for you to use. It started off with $30 and more than $3000 has been charged to it, with people filling up the card as it gets low. There's even a twitter feed to show the current balance.

I'm pretty sure this is just part of the "demand media" generation we live in, but articles like How to Love the Taste of Water: 8 steps (with video) over at wikiHow just baffle me. What's next, "how to breath in 14 easy steps" or "walk or drive, a handy decision tree infographic for your iphone for those though decision making times."

I will try to compare, the best I can, the attention that the same photograph received from each of these sites over the course of 24 hours. If as a photographer you are looking at photo sharing sites, in part, as a way to promote your work to a wider audience, the engagement your photographs receive online may be of interest. This case is very specific and of course everyone's circumstances will differ, but this is my experience.

Another great video in the series, Everything is a Remix Part 3 is out. The next time that someone complains that Apple copied the Android notification system, or that Windows copied the Linux virtual desktops, or that Ubuntu is trying to be both Apple and Microsoft (I've done all of these things BTW), watch this, and realize that pretty much everything is a copy of something, and it's more about how you put these copies together that makes things interesting.

A bit off topic for normal fare, but both Vancouverites and Bostonians (Bostonions?) know that tonight game one of the Stanley Cup Playoff starts. Some great pics of Canucks Pride Around BC were collected on the Vancouver Blog Miss 604.

Ironic that a site with an article 20 Reasons Why Your Website Design Sucks is the same site that pops up one of the "web 2.0 popups" (overlay asking if you want to sign up for a newsletter or some crap). Factor that in when you read the article. Via Forgetfoo.

The 'bonus' video of the greatest proposal ever though, don't let your girlfriend, wife or fiance watch that lest they be very jealous and ask "why didn't you do something like that for me? Don't you love me as much as he does her?" (might be just me projecting though).

I've always been fascinated by people who are skilled in art, and this "how I drew it" video over on myextralife.com is pretty awesome (though the video quality for the first half or so isn't the best resolution). Well worth the 7 minutes for sure.

That's one of the videos that was posted on Vincent Laforet's Blog related to how small and easy high quality video is getting. Completely recommend watch that first video in high quality on a big screen. Not for the faint of heart though!

Friend of mine on Facebook pointed me to the Expo 86 anniversary party at Science World. If you're a 30-something Vancouverite you definitely remember Expo 86 and should get in on this. Live 80s music, Expo 86 Films, etc.

Great video from Adobe: It Gets Better. Beautiful and true all at once.

My personal note to people who have nothing better to do than make fun of / insult / torture / oppress people because of their sexual orientation: "Grow the fuck up, this world has way more screwed up things to freak out about than man on man or woman on woman love".

I recently received these links, and I thought of sharing them with you, maybe they are interesting enough that you will post them: different sorting algorithms illustrated with traditional folk dances from Transylvania.
I think it's an awesome display of culture and worst case performance of the algorithms :))

Yay! I'm back and ready to post up a storm... well, at least a minor drizzle, but it's starting up again! Lets start up with Dear Coffee, I Love You, a blog all (all) about coffee and coffee related things. Via Shawn Blanc.

I'm not all that good at organizing things, but if you want to help support Japan in the crisis that I'm pretty sure you've heard about, check out the Vancouver Japan Relief Walk of Hope:

We encourage all participant to wear their red and whites, to show off the colors of both countries flags. Having a huge network of photographers, Christopher and his team will be covering this event from many angles and perspectives, capturing the true spirit of giving in action. Opportunities for direct donations can be made along the walk and also at the final destination where a team of volunteers will be meeting the arrivals. This Campaign will continue even after the Walk of Hope has completed.

This will be a great photo walk for Vancouver photographers looking to help out and have fun day, and you'll help a good cause. I'm looking forward to this big time! I know there are at least a few of UFies.org readers in Japan and while I don't know you I hope you and your families are safe, and I hope that I can support in this small way.

I'll repost this again as time gets closer, but again, please do sign up and donate!

Given the speed with which companies shift names, it's not unlikely that the new Quebecor arena will be renamed something else within a few years. And, once again, we'll all feel like idiots when we can't remember what to call that big ugly building thingy where the dudes on the skates hit that rubber thingamajig.

Sadly because of the monopolies these companies have, and the gobs of cash, there's not really a lot you can do about it, because even if you (eg) cut your cable, you still need an internet connection to download your TV shows (assuming you don't just quit cold turkey of course) and guess who you give money to for that.... the cable company, and with caps and net neutrality coming down, you'll be ending up giving them even more money.

OK little boys and little boys who have grown up, you will want to look at the 2012 Lamborghini Aventador. Truly a pinup I'd put on my wall. Check out this shot to see just how sleek it is. Thanks to H at work for passing it on to me this morning.

My buddy H sent me to codereddit, and while I would never advocate redditing while at work (it's like stealing from the company), but if you enjoy a quick reddit break, reading this page will look, from a distance, a lot more like work than the normal "skin" on it.

Now they just need multiple language options, and perhaps a text to speech version as well...

Google for Weddings is a site set up to show you how to use the various google tools for wedding planning. Not sure if this is more about using the existing tools, or a new set of tools using picasa/blogger/etc under the hood. Still, it'll help keep engaged nerds happy :)

3quarksdaily has a nice long look at software "chrome" (not the browser as they point out several times) and why obsession on making digital analogs to physical objects really really sucks.

This is the iBooks app. Notice how lovingly the designers have made it look like you are in the middle of reading a physical book by drawing a little pseudo-3D evocation, down each vertical side, of the pages you have read and the pages you have still to read. What do you think this looks like when you are on page 2 of a book, or 2 pages from the end? I'll tell you what it looks like: exactly the same.

Starting today we'll provide you with the ability to experience Facebook entirely over HTTPS. You should consider enabling this option if you frequently use Facebook from public Internet access points found at coffee shops, airports, libraries or schools. The option will exist as part of our advanced security features, which you can find in the "Account Security" section of the Account Settings page.

If you're concerned about security, things like Firesheep, and not allowing people to get into your facebook account fairly trivially, then this is a good thing. Head to the settings page on your facebook account and enable this now.

Dropbox has a nice little contest going - Dropquest 2011 which will let you have lots of prizes and some free extra space. If you don't have dropbox yet, get on it! Thanks to @hawkeye @halkeye for pointing me to it.

The craziest thing is the degree to which the flood was at before they started to get worried. It wasn't until the cars were starting to be swept away before they started to get worried, but up until then it was more like "wow, what a quaint little river we have running through our parking lot." Course, in an insane a place as Australia with their man eating birds and 8,000 types of things that can kill you, this is probably normal. Bonus points to the guy who went into the flood to drive his Range Rover away.

Some might say that the James Van Der Memes site is just a rip off of the classic Eric Conveys an Emotion, but as a fan of Dawson's Creek from back in the day (and of course Katie Holmes before she went insane and married someone other than me), I gotta pimp his site a bit. Cool stuff and a great idea.

It's been all around the net, so I figure I'll link to it as well. Ben the Bodyguard.com is the website for a new iPhone app that will protect your sensitive iPhone data. There's not much else there in terms of details, but when you hit the site just scroll down and be amazed at what you can do with HTML/Javascript (HTML5?) and other nifty (non-Flash) web technologies.

Seriously, most of the iPhone apps I'll buy on a whim are from well designed and informative websites. I think if this was a $2.99 app I'd probably buy it sight unseen just from the site. Kudos to the designer. Make sure you run through it a couple of times as well there's a lot of small subtle (and gorgeously done) detail in there that I missed the first time through.

A great article on what Facebook did recently with their big messaging announcement, and how they could take it in a different direction. Honestly I don't totally understand what FB messaging will be until I see it, but this article gives a pretty good idea what it's not.

Bridge Eaters on Vimeo is another video in the vein of the ones posted the other day. This one demonstrates a couple of key points that you need for good TS video (I took some random iPhone video footage and played with a TS Video app yesterday)... View from above and a view of big things far away, both of which enhance the "view of tiny toys" feeling. Embedded below, full screen and HD recommended.

Cool video to Help Kids Understand Food Ads. Of course, if you think this is some sort of grand scheme by fast food places to make sure the pictures of their burgers look 100x more awesome than in real life, you're right, course, this is no different than pretty much every other industry and every other commercial image or video. If you look at any product of any sort in any sort of ad and think they're not manipulated in some way or other, think again. Every screen image is simulated, lash inserts are added, and every bit of food has some gross and disgusting goop applied to make it look succulent, and I'm pretty sure half the time cars in ads are all computer generated.

Amazing and Death-defying wingsuit video shows what it's like to be a real-life superhero. The part where he skims by the statue of Christ The Redeemer in Brazil is possibly the most awesome thing I've seen.

That said I have no idea how they manage to find areas where land is sloped just right so that they skim above it while falling (with style).

Since the launch of Opera 10.5 in March 2010, I've been using it as my primary browser, whether at work or at home. Using Ubuntu at work, and a Windows netbook at home, I wanted a fast browser for my netbook and a coherent browsing experience on both operating systems. And this is where Opera 10.5 (and newer) fits perfectly.

Vizeddit is a very cool javascripty magic thing that lets you see reddit votes and comments in realtime. Works on chrome and FF (possibly others). Note: If it's just falling reddit aliens, give it a bit more time, soon it will show up properly (unless the server's crashed again of course). Very cool stuff!

Awesome video of a home project to send an HD video recorder into spaaaaaace. Seriously though, it's pretty amazing what a couple of guys with some consumer grade equipment and a tiny bit of knowhow can do these days. Video embedded below.

http://erkie.github.com is hard to describe, but I thank @dkubb for pointing me to it. Basically it's a bookmarklet that lets you destroy ads on a webpage by playing asteroids. I didn't get it at first either, but now that I do, I'm using it on every page :)

This preview includes support for two new areas, namely enhanced support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 Beta and native 64-bit support for all major desktop operating systems including Linux, Mac, and Windows.

In case you were looking for an excuse to buy a second DSLR that does video, you can check out this HDR video accomplished using dual 5D Mark IIs. I'm not a fan of overdone HDR, and overdone HDR in video is just as bad. This isn't overdone per-se, but it could be easily abused. That said, if trends go as trends go, I see this being a built in feature to DSLRs in 5 years....

Pretty amazing when you consider they did this in the days before you could just throw it to your 12 year old neighbor with the fast computer to whip up in a couple of hours in Maya or whatever is the go-to app for 3D modelling these days. Still, doing it the old way with miniatures has more "soul" than these new fangled CG effects...

Wow, I didn't hear this... I knew that The Stig (from the awesome BBC car show Top Gear) revealed his identity in a tell-all book, but I hadn't heard that he had been sacked. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to read the book, and think that Stig's story would be awesome, but I don't like how he went about it.

Save The Words is a cool concept to help un-dumb-down the airwaves (as it were). You can pledge to adopt a forgotten or unloved word in the English language and pledge to use it and spread it. The "pick me" and "oh me me!" are cute too.

3pm: more ring work and 60 mins on the exercise bike (again working those huge legs for endurance)
5pm: 2000 sit-ups; 500-800 dips; 500 press-ups; 500 shrugs with a 30kg barbell and 10 mins of neck exercises
7pm: steak and pasta meal again with fruit juice (orange i think it was)

This guy must have been in insane good shape, I don't think I can do 800 dips in a week. Course, when your job is to be in shape, I guess doing nothing but eating and working out 7 days a week is the way to go :)

If you love your Mac enough that you'd do anything to feel like you're using it while at work or on a windows machine, you will be interested in this transformation pack that turns your windows system into something that looks (a bit) like OS/X. Sadly as I've found in the year or two I've had a mac it's really not the "bling" that makes the mac nice to work on, but the underlying framework, interface guidelines, and apps. But if you have a jones for a dock and menu bar along the top, this might be for you.

Fantastic shot and description over on flickr called View From a Car Carrier. Read the description to see what it's like steering one of those huge cargo ships. I also encourage you to go through the rest of the My Office Window set of images showing the varied life of a cargo ship driver who does nothing but ferry these boats in and out of the harbor. This was featured on the flickr blog today.

Great shots over at io9 of the comic-con "God Hates Fags" counterprotest with awesome geek oriented signs. Seriously, can't we pack these Westboro Baptist Church assholes off to a mining colony somewhere where there isn't enough air? Just sayin....

Time travel isn't just science fiction: Albert Einstein's general relativity suggests it could exist. And now we might have solved the tricky matter of time paradoxes. It's all just a question of adjusting probabilities.

Not sure if this is the next big scandal, but I've seen a couple of stories on how Skype has blocked Fring. Fring is an iPhone app that's been around for a few years now and connects to a bunch of different messenger services, including skype. With the iPhone 4 they've recently shown off how they too can do video calling over skype (which, I believe, skype doesn't do yet).

From the Fring blog:

Needless to say, we are very disappointed that Skype, who once championed the cause of openness is now trying to muzzle competition, even at the expense of its own users.

We're sorry for the inconvenience Skype has caused you.

Another story on this is here. Not sure if this is maybe some "oops" and it'll turn out to be a non issue, but I can see a lot of Fring users, and general internet rage about this.

There's a lot of anger and snark on the internet (I should know, I write some of it), so it was great news that this weekend gave us an internet story that just makes you smile. That story is the tale of Zach Anner, a young man with cerebral palsy, who became the internet's latest celebrity when he entered Oprah Winfrey's contest to give a regular person their own TV show. Anner's audition video was hilarious and his overall good nature won over the internet and soon a few well-placed links had landed him more than two and a half million votes!

Sneaky, that - trying to get you to install McAfee Security Scan Plus when all you actually want is an update of Flash.

I can understand if you're a small company trying to get a bit of extra revenue from installing crapware like the Ask toolbar, etc, but Adobe seems a bit big to do this sort of thing. The only justification I can see is that they are truly concerned about user's security and feel they aren't going to listen to a "hey, you know you should have an AV program installed" type message, and figure it's better to just shove AV software down their throats. I pity the IT workers that are going to have to deal with uninstalling this or dealing with conflicts or other really bad things resulting from users randomly installing things on their computers.

Now, I know that white space is an important element in layout and design. Yet, somehow, it seems that when that empty space is sitting there, staring back at me, I find myself struggling with the need to fill that space.

Good post on the 37 Signals blog on Steve Ballmer at D8. I'm not an MS fan by any means, but based on the clips out of Ballmer when asked about the future of computing, tablets, etc, he did seem to be kinda talking out his ass and not making sense at all, especially compared to Jobs. Not that MS is in any danger of going out of business any time soon of course :)

If you read the FAQ for BankSimple, you'll probably be sold with the 'how do I deposit a check' question. No idea if anyone is going to buy into a "new" bank, but if they come to Canada I'd probably give them a chance, based purely on their attitude towards customers (well, at least on the webpage).

I heard about FlashBake a while back on TWiG. Basically it will periodically commit all the "stuff" you're doing, along with context (music playing, that sort of thing) to a GIT repository. Basically a private "life backup" system. Something to play with for the geeks out there.

Reddit has their list of Real Life Cheat Codes. Everything from how to play a DVD and get straight to the movie to getting out of speeding tickets. Of course, your mileage may vary with some of these :)

In case it's gone when you read this, you can see bythis image that The Pirate Bay is back online and mocking the entertainment industry for trying to shut them down. Silly multi-bazillion-dollar industry can't even stop some guys in Sweden from running a server....

Reminisce about the good ol' days when a men had real keyboards that went clack clack? You'll love the IBM Model M Keyboard Simulator which is pretty much exactly what you think it is. Just make sure your sound is turned up to "manly".

When the "pay what you want" Humble Indie Bundle came out a while back, I noticed, but since the games weren't "big titles", I was kinda "meh". However, today when coming back to the site I noticed that the games are all cross-platform, and after watching the video, the games actually look pretty good. Hey, if you don't want to play them gift them to a friend or neighborhood kid who could use something nice. Remember that it goes to help the Child's Play and EFF charities.

Seems like everyone is weighing in on Flash after Steve Jobs put up his open letter a few days ago. Today there comes Opera Software Offers Thoughts on Future of Flash where they basically say that they'll continue to support it, but sees it taking a backseat to HTML5 in the future.

Build It With Me is an interesting idea.... say if you are a designer or developer, put in an overview of your project, and what you're seeking, and.... uhmm... profit? It's a cool looking idea, and a sexy (but a bit slow) website. I'm not sure if it's really just a way to get free work on your project, or potentially a great way to connect people to work on projects. If you're looking for a project to help out on or something to do in your free time, this is the place to get it.

Kyle Conroy asks Should I have bought that Apple Product? and compares what you'd have now if you had bought the same amount of Apple Stock instead of that first MacBook Pro. Of course, it's a pretty silly comparison, as you're comparing something that has a value that goes up (stock) compared to something that's value goes down (sometimes like a rock) (computer hardware).

Great post on twitter from someone on The scariest pricing idea ever. That works. The "pay me what you think it's worth" model is something you'd think is crazy, but apparently works. Case in point: Radio Head's "pay us what you think it's worth" album.

She likes the high Mach, as we penetrate deeper into Libyan airspace. Leaving the footprint of our sonic boom across Benghazi , I sit motionless, with stilled hands on throttles and the pitch control, my eyes glued to the gauges.

Jeff Atwood is advocating Three Monitors For Every User over at Coding Horror. Outside of the fact that I don't have enough video ports to make this work at home, I have to agree. The "center focus" issue for me is hardest, though the downside is the lack of desk space.

I read this story about how the Energizer battery charger contains a backdoor and I have a few issues with it. First, agree with Reddit in this is why the world needs open source. Second though, is WTF do you need your battery charger to plug into the computer, or have it do anything but pull power from the USB. Seriously, am I an old fogey when I say that back in my day you plugged your battery charger into the wall socket...

Great job Blockbuster, Bringing Back Late Fees after all the big "no more late fees" marketing campaign. Of course, they claim they aren't "late" fees, they are and "additional daily rate". Yea, I totally see the difference there.

When you get caught up in minutia, the really important stuff gets left undone. Often simply because in buying the low-carb salad dressing, you give yourself a mental checkmark in the "healthy eating" column and proceed to violate the truly important issues.

Slashfilm has info and video of the Largest Lightsaber Fight EVER at a british FlashMob. Looks epicly awesome, I'd love to be there to see the expressions on the "normal" patrons faces when all of a sudden lightsabers appeared all around them!

John: First you need to understand how the gangs work. At the bottom are the "foot soldiers", kids who spend all of their time online to find email addresses and send out the first emails to get people interested. When they receive a reply, the victim is passed up the chain, to someone who has better English to get copies of ID from them like copies of their passport and driving licenses and build up trust. Then when they are ready to ask for money, they are passed further up again to someone who will pretend to be a barrister or shipping agent who will tell the victim that they need to pay charges or even a bribe to get the big cash amount out of the country. When they pay up, the gang master will collect the money from the Western Union office, using fake ID that they have taken from other scam victims.

Really good article over at Engadget of 10 outdated elements of desktop operating systems. Especially when you think about how far technology has come (the iPhone, etc) since the whole "window mouse" paradigm came into the forground of conciousness in the 80's.

Next thing, he asks you to invite all your friends (standard stuff, almost every group wants to be famous!). But here he asks you to paste what is called "JavaScript" (it doesn't start with HTTP://" so it's not a link). Now here all it does is select all of your friends, but it could just as much infect your computer with a virus, make you go to any site he wants, etc. Don't ever type in any JavaScript directly into your address bar.

101 Ways to Lose Your Gut over at Men's Fitness has a bunch of small tips that in theory, can do some help. Not sure if they can help you without some willpower and ambition (two things I'm sorely lacking right now) but they are at least a list of nice, concise tips.

Nice post on some things to do and not do on twitter, and Why Your 4,243,564 Twitter Followers Don't Mean Jack. Speaking of which, these people who follow thousands and thousands of people I don't understand, there's no way you can read or get any decent content from all those people, and quite frankly it's just annoying because I know you're not following my tweets (at @arcterex) because you care about me or what I have to say, you're just absorbing me into you mega-twitter feed for your SEO (or TEO?). Meh.

Ironically I got this link from looking at one of those people's feeds while trying to see if they were all SEO spam or random links or not :)

One of the (sad IMHO) realities these days is that if you have either a site that gets a non-trivial amount of traffic, or want to have the time available to you to run a site as more than a hobby, you need to run ads. Google ads are the most common, and are easily blocked with Adblock. Note: I both use adblock and also run google ads on this site. Anyway, the very cool site 1001 Noisy Cameras is going ad-free.

The site is a plethora of camera related news, with an amazing amount of content each day and while I had to put 'maybe' in the poll, I definitely wish them the best of luck and look forward to seeing how the endeavor goes.

As an aside, over here in UFies land, the income from having ads on the blog is somewhere between $0.07 - $3.50 a day on average (that's $0.008/h to $0.44/h) . Though I do appreciate everyone who goes to visit some sponsors :)

In the Revision 3 Blog, they have An Open Letter to Conan O'Brien, introducing him to the internet and working conditions at Revision 3. Personally I think it'd be interesting to see a "mainstream" celebrity go from TV to the internet, and see if the alteration in the payment model, which in theory would give more money to the personality instead of the studio for advertising, etc, would make a real difference and allow the celeb to make a real go of it.

In the article saying that Football Games Have 11 Minutes of Action this confirms what I've always suspected.... that there's a hugely disproportionate signal to noise ratio (or in this case, game to crap ratio) in football:

According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes.

I was immediately ushered into a room and forced to sign the second contract of the process, which gave away most of my body and most of my soul to Fox.

[...]the producers were shameless in reminding us that American Idol is a television show first, and a talent competition second. If we wanted to be on TV, we'd have to tell a compelling story and do and say crazy shit.

Anyone who has been following the WW1 blog, a timeshifted blog of letters from a soldier in The Great War posted in real time (well, 90 years later) will be sad (and happy) that Harry's Home. The last letter was posted today. The author, Bill Lamin, has done an excellent job of creating a unique blog that has given me (and others I'm sure) great joy to read. He updates the post with his plans and what's next. If you haven't read it, head over and read from the start, or skim, as it's a unique look at a life that seems like it's from another world, but in fact wasn't that long ago.

So looks like the infamous 4Chan has declared today (January 6, 2010) "Porn day". Seems YouTube is facing a 4chan porn attack after the removal of a kids account who, among other childish things, posted about how he was going after 4chan and had God on his side. Techmeme also has the story.

Great (though a bit long) slide presentation on The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. Mac fanboy or Windows fanboy you have to admit he is a king of the presentation, and there are a few gems in there that I think anyone can take away to use in their professional life.

Anyone will be impressed by this video of the India Monkey King, with rock climbers being probably even more so, cause they know just how insane this guy is. This guy taught himself to rock climb to escape poverty in India, watching monkeys and Spider-man for inspiration. All I can say is "wow".

Seems that Demi Moore's dogs are being set on Boing-Boing over several posts of photo analysis of the infamous "missing hip flesh" cover shot.

Speaking as a photographer, every single cover image on every single fashion magazine cover has been photoshopped and manipulated. Hell, every magazine cover has been photoshopped in some way or another. Seriously, anyone with half a brain can clearly see that fashion mags take liberties (sometimes more than others) with skin smoothing, enhancements, de-hancements, etc. Demi needs to just chill the f out and bring back the dogs, and say to the world "yea, my image was manipulated to make me look my best, same as every other cover girl out there, deal with it". I think this has gone down a road that will be hard to gracefully back out of though.

Ah, more deals... Backupify Cloud Backup is free until January 31. I've never heard of this service before, but it allows you to back up your cloud services (facebook, twitter, flickr, etc) to another cloud service. I'm not sure it totally makes sense, but backups are good right? The deal is free and unlimited backup after you're signed up, which is nice. Still cool (but remember that you need to trust any service you give over the keys to your online services to).

According to this tweet (and others if you search for rogers on twitter say that there's a data network outage on Fido/Rogers in BC and Alberta. So if you can't get your twitters or email on your smartphone, that's probably the reason.

Also this link has some more info (well, tweets from people experiencing the same thing anyway).

Update: Looks like it might have just come back. Fingers crossed that's it. To be fair this is the first issue I've had in over a year of Rogers data service.

Seth is pimping out his new ebook: What Matters Now available for free on his site. The book is on what to think and do to make a difference, gain friends/influence people, that sort of thing (from what I can see).

Do you have one of those annoying "apple" people in your life? You know, the macbook lugging, starbucks swilling, must have a clean aluminium and glass desk or he cries types? (Also known as a hipster) If you do you'll be happy to know that Shawn Blanc has a great list of presents for you. From iPhone holders to $40 notepads to coffee, it's a great list :)

I'm all for people having hobbies, but this guy, who face paints himself every day with a different face, seriously is either the coolest guy ever or someone who really needs to get out more. Ironically, the whole project started one day he was stuck at home.

io9 has a gallery of Geek Tattoos,The Good, The Bad, And The Just Plain Crazy. I don't know about some of them, but I'd totally get a 'Don't Panic' tattoo. Also I think that while I'm sure she's insane, I'd totally marry this girl (if my wife said it was OK of course).

Ever get tired and pissed off or the google analytics holding up a web page loading? Now that they have Launched Asynchronous Tracking this might be a thing of the past. Folks, go forth and update thy page templates!

The CERN Press Release has details of the first collisions at the LHC. Turns out it didn't create a black hole, destroy the world, galaxy, or universe, which is a good sign. Instead it did a bunch of.... uhm... sciency stuff that you should read the press release or the slashdot story for. Again, world not destroyed, no black holes either.

Well, as predicted when The Pirate Bay was first "bought" by a gaming company a while back (and I only put that in "air quotes" because there seems to have been some dispute about stock fraud, etc in the deal) it's as good as dead. Slashdot notes that it's Tracker has shut down and switched To Distributed Hash Table.

I don't normally put up stuff about contests here, but hey, Chase Jarvis is the man when it comes to great photography and he blogged about how you can get $100,000 in 140 Seconds through a Nikon sponsored contest showing your day, through your lens (literally and figuratively) in 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Pretty cool idea. Sample videos from both him and Rainn Wilson (from The Office) on the link.

Definitely a sign of the world we live in, the twitter account @shitmydadsays has been picked up as a sitcom. I'm not sure if this is really that outside of the standard sitcom formula of "family with crank old man dad character", but the fact they attribute something to twitter is interesting.

Course, it could also be the whole thing is a scam and the twitter account was setup when the show was quietly created. The account has only been active since August 3rd, and somehow 73 tweets in three months isn't something that I could see a high powered TV exec picking up, but hey, stranger things have happened.

Some awesome videos and pictures of Kevin Richardson and his Lions. They really act with their human the same way my cats act with me, just that they are a weeeee bit bigger. Course, I still wouldn't be surprised if some day you hear that this guy mysteriously disappeared and only a toe was ever found. Still, immensely cute :)

Sadly Google still hasn't got up to date imager or maps for the new Golden Ears Bridge, even though you can see in Street View that the street view car clearly drove over it (hit your up arrow twice and see how the street view jumps to the top of the bridge and then back down). Bing maps at least have half the bridge....

Dive Into Mark has a great look at Why do we have an IMG element? and traces its origins back to the original proposal, manages to fit in the history of more than a couple of browsers, and ties it all up nicely with a look at the state of the HTTP/HTML/Browser world today.

Some of the operating systems from 1993 still exist, but none of them are relevant to the modern web. Most people today who "experience" the web do so on a PC running Windows 2000 or later, a Mac running Mac OS X, a PC running some flavor of Linux, or a handheld device like an iPhone. In 1993, Windows was at version 3.1 (and competing with OS/2), Macs were running System 7, and Linux was distributed via Usenet. (Want to have some fun? Find a graybeard and whisper "Trumpet Winsock" or "MacPPP.")

As a note, I shudder thinking about Trumpet Winsock..... not sure if those are shudders of reminiscing joy, or repressed fear. Definitely makes me glad things have moved on!

Daily Kos has a story about how Sequoia Voting Systems hacks self in foot by revealing source code stripped of what they thought was information vital to let others read the data. They were foiled by the magic of the UNIX "strings" command. Whether or not the data that was revealed shows logic for rigging elections though.... well, read the article.

Remember I was joking the other day about the next steps for Google Maps / Earth being mapping the insides of buildings? Looks like they already have a Helicopter that Scans Indoor Environments autonomously,

There's a big ass fire in the downtown Vancouver area. Twitter hhas lots of people talking about it, looks like it's three boats down in coal harbor. I tweeted about this with pics from my office building. Not a bad win for real time news I think!

10/GUI has a new imagining for the desktop, not something uber-radical, but different enough and utilizing the new technology we have coming in such as multi-touch, etc. They seem to take a lot into consideration, and I'm interested to see if anyone adopts this. Personally I would see this coming into the GNOME desktop if there were the multi-touch devices that they use (and need) to make it work.

In a shocking and completely expected turn of events, the "get a PC with Vista and get a free upgrade to Windows 7" offers that have been trying to convince people not to wait till Windows 7 is released to buy a new PC, can come with some Hidden Fees. Some pretty hefty for a DVD being shipped out to you. As I understand it, it's a free upgrade from Microsoft as far as they are concerned, but if you get it from a PC manufacturer (ie: Dell, Lenovo, etc), they basically get to charge you what they want for it (in the form of "service fees").

So either wait till after all the super-cool Windows 7 launch parties are done before buying a PC, or be careful and find out exactly what you get for free or not for free. Or download a real free OS.

If you're some sort of sadist, you might enjoy some Tips for an Optimal Running Workout. You'll note a few things wrong with the list though, first is the wake-up at 5:30am... does that time of day really exist?

Pretty mindblowing technology to allow a user to hand sketch a scene, and the system almost-automatically creates the scene from an internet image search. It seems kinda simple unless you've ever tried to composite several images together and had to deal with lighting color, texture, and the raft of other things that tend to go completely wrong.

It's only a matter of time before all the user interaction is gone in selecting appropriate images and the system can automatically create dirty pictures of me and Megan Fox (stolen joke from Reddit).

John's Background Switcher was pimped out on Lifehacker as a very cool utility for giving you some more variety in your Windows wallpaper. My only request to it would be I want combined functionality of it and Display Fusion and it's great multi-monitor support. Maybe even an option to only download dual screen formatted images and automatically set both monitors. Still, noted here for coolness and freeness and usefulness.

BMW EfficientDynamics tells the tale of a new BMW concept car that does 90mpg and has BMW M3 performance. Now I don't truly know that much about cars, but I've watched a lot of Top Gear lately and know that a) M3's are good (though not cool anymore), and b) rarely do concept cars become real cars. With rare exceptions of course :) Warning, don't watch that last link after eating.

I know it's shocking, but seems that "Idol" (in this case Australian Idol) screws over it's winners such that they somehow didn't make a cent on 300,000 CDs. Either all the CDs were comped out to industry execs and the winners' parents, or the deal you sign screws you over. Either way, interesting article.

Most of this Digital Photographers, Welcome Back to 1999 is about what's going on in the digital photography world, but at the bottom are a few good Youtube videos about how OLED and Harry Potter style newspapers are (almost) here.

Call me a commie, but the level of credibility of the folks at the DC Tea Party March is.... how do you say... "lacking". That said, I'm in Canada. Definitely an amusing look at the folks who go to this sort of thing. Cherry picked I'm sure for the more amusing/radical/crazy folks. The guy with the "Joe Wilson for President" sign saying "well, I don't support Joe Wilson for president" was particularly amusing.

Somehow I missed this article on ars technica on The Windows 7 Taskbar versus the OS X Dock. Nice article, goes into some of the UI issues with either method, as well as the design differences and similarities.

The actual offers, however, were miserly. Cash4Gold sent back checks ranging from $7.60 to $12.72 (or 11% to 18% of melt value), the lowest amounts of any firm. But others weren't far behind: GoldKit offered $7.81 to $20.59, and GoldPaq $8.22 to $13.11.

Best comment on this was on Digg.com, where a commenter stated "pro tip: don't do business with a company that substitutes the number 4 for the word 'for'.

Digital Photography School has a nice set of 10 Astounding Astrophotos by Phil Hart, and Australian photographer. These aren't easy to get, if you check the details for this impressive image you'll see that a total of 13 hours was required to capture the image, along with a host of impressive sounding equipment.

First of all, if you don't know who James May is, sequester yourself inside for a week and watch all of Top Gear. When you're done, check out the Lego House he's building. Why? No clue. It's pretty awesome though :)

In a thrilling video, @sockington celebrates his one millionth follower. A cat. Who posts things like "A MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR WHAT OF YOURS I JUST BROKE ACCIDENTALLY what oh nothing". Has (as of 4pm thursday the 27th of August in the year of our lord 2009) 1,082,191 people and spam bots watching his posts. Holy crap.

That said, I'm intruiged by this cat and his tweets and videos, and pissed off (still) that I didn't think of it first.

Codexon gives 6 Simple Tips to Get Stackoverflow Reputation Fast, and shows why Stackoverflow.com has some social-engineering errors in the way they present the information and some of their rules. Of course, reputation and karma on the site aside, it's a great site with good information, and hopefully this will show them a bit of information on how to avoid the social engineering bugs.

Anyone heard of Plex Media Center for OS X before? Looks pretty sexy... the only thing that these are all missing are support for decoder cards (a la MythTV) or something to auto-torrent download to give the impression of recording TV. MythTV is kinda old and busted looking and in terms of some of the features (especially compared to the new sexiness that these media center apps have), but it will record TV which none of the other systems do (for the most part).

Zed Shaw (famous for his anti-Rails rant a while back) has some great thoughts on The Impermanence, Karma, and Bad Behavior of Why The Lucky Stiff. "Why" or "_why" as you may or may not have heard basically suddenly and unexpectedly removed all his online "stuff" which in this day and age is fairly unusual. Zed has a good wrap up of what he did and some thoughts on why.

To please the entertainment industry GGF will install a system that will allow the copyright holders to either authorize the 'illegal' torrent or have it removed from the site. If the copyright holder opts to choose the first option they will be compensated every time the file is downloaded. In addition, the board says that it will pay penalties if it has to.
[...]
One of the pitfalls of this new reactive system is of course that copyright holders might start to remove content en masse instead of authorizing it, so that there is nothing available for the (paying) users to download and share. Without content the users will walk away and The Pirate Bay will slowly die.

And by "slowly die" I think you mean "quickly die".

Somehow this doesn't seem like it'll be "business as usual" as TPB promised when they first announced the buyout.

However I am impressed that someone managed to acquire over 1 million twitter followers and at the same time basically be a guy posting cat pictures to flickr. Guess you need a story to go with those cat pictures. Sadly this means it's too late for me to start the Corny and Rex blog (or the Corny and Rex and Zoon and Munchkin and Bump and Bear blog).

Anyone thinking IE is a better browser who ever reads YouTube comments is simply wrong. Check out the YouTube Comment Snob extension and have your experience be that much better. Or just don't go to YouTube....

Good news read today that the Siberian Tiger is no longer in as much trouble as it was a few decades ago. According to vertex (a blog) and their source (MoscowTopNews), there are more animals alive than 100 years ago. Good news, if you believe it. I say let the hunting begin! I'm going to make cat beds and throw rugs out of tiger hides!

Two weeks from now The Pirate Bay as we know it will cease to exist. To gain access to the site users of the new Pirate Bay will be charged a monthly fee, and even then it remains to be seen what files they will have access to.

It'll be interesting to see what the changes are and for my own morbid curiosity, how soon TPB will die and be eclipsed by MiniNova, BTJunkie and friends, same as SuprNova before it.

Mr. Skin's knowledge of nude scenes and slips in movies is amazing and legendary (I'm listening to his appearance on Howard Stern right now), and he has his Top 100 Nude Scenes with some classic, uhm... watching material.

Remember how one of the promises of HTML5 is to allow video to play without having to use flash? Looks like YouTube, who you could say uses Flash video "a lot" is flirting with it. They have an HTML5 Demo page showing off their interface playing a video with no flash involved. Looks good, it's basically YouTube and the only reason you'd know it's not Flash is if you don't have the flash plugin installed or look at the source code.

Once again this is something you'll need a modern browser to see (IE users are left out again :( Hopefully an update sometime soon will include HTML5 in IE).

Found a Glenn Beck video on the government cars system over at ForgetFoo. Basically there's a 'I agree' page when you go into some US government car site that these guys interpret to mean that Uncle Sam has legal ownership of your computer while it's connected to the site, and has access to all your files on the computer and they can continue to monitor and track you and you after. First of all, not really technologically possible unless you're running some sort of app on the system and secondly, I'm pretty sure clicking an 'I agree' icon wouldn't hold up in court :)

First of all, I don't read comics. As geeky as I am, comics have just never thrilled me, and other than borrowing a bunch from a friend years ago, I've basically ignored them. However, The Totally Rad Show mentioned Kick-Ass and it's associated movie at Comic-Con, and I grabbed the first 6 episodes.

Fucking Brilliant is my conclusion. Basically it's a "what if a nerdy kid wanted to become a superhero, in our universe". Issues of school, explaining fight-related injuries to your dad, that sort of thing. Absolutely fantastic and awesome, amazingly well drawn, violent, gory, and awesome.

About the closest I've found to any more information on the movie is over at slashfilm. Seriously - go get this comic, totally worth it.

OK, first of all if this is true, you really have to wonder how completely fucked up the kid and parents are. Seriously. The story is: Kid Drinks Gasoline To Be More Like the Transformers. A 9 year old figured that since the transformers drink it, he could get super-energy from it.

Sounds more like a fake "ha ha look how screwed up Chinese kids are" story that something real.... if it is real though, you know those stories that talk about "kids who play video games don't kill people, you have to be messed up to think that and video games don't have anything to do with it"? Yea, this is one of those kids...

OK, this is potentially the coolest thing ever. The Interactive Electronic Tattoo over at Neatorama is something that's inserted under the skin and uses glucose to electricity.

The device is bluetooth and allows touch control through the skin. Imagine being able to walk up to a computer and getting a terminal login that you can type commands into, or use an iPhone like touch-screen. Or have it talk to your car, cell phone, or whatever else you can think of. Also as it's computerized you would be able to update it with new functionality....

Some potentially awesome uses for this, you just have to be OK with a permanent non-natural, electricity powered addition under your skin :)

Interesting site to study happiness. Track Your Happiness has both a questionnaire section as well as an iPhone component which lets you track how happy you are at any particular time. Interesting idea, as long as you don't mind them getting some personal information about your financial situation, etc.

Google Latitude is now available for the iPhone. Looks good too, the mobile web design they've done is second-to-none in my opinion, though there are a couple of odd niggles I saw, nothing that won't be fixed or a non-issue though.

For those who don't know, latitude is basically an awesome stalking app, which lets you see where your friends are and share your location with them. In theory great for coordinating meetups with friends, or seeing where the hot party is. Even better to use as a stalking app to find out where your ex-is now that the *sniff* bitch left *sniff* you for that bastard Ronnie!!

For some reason I thought they had this already, but seems that Google Earth now has the moon in it as well. You can get more information from the website linked above or the @googleearth twitter feed. The cool things are proper 3D models (taken no doubt from the soundstage where they were first used) of the landers, interactive views like the panoramic views you can "fly" into a-la earth on google earth, and other nifty things. Check out the video on the splash page, or grab the version 5.0 to check it all out. If you already have Google Earth 5.0, just go to the planet dropdown and select 'moon' and voila, there you go.

The Google Reader blog has some details of some of the changes to the Google RSS reader (my main page BTW). Following, liking and people searching are on the plate. The liking is basically what you get from facebook, and I'm a bit surprised that this wasn't added earlier. Looks to work well, and will give people some more ways to find interesting stuff online. The people searching I'm kinda "meh" on though, as the only people who I know who use the Google Reader I'm already following their shared updates :)

Seems that not only do same sex human couples have to deal with the same things that traditional couples do, seems that same sex animal couples have issues as well. SF Zoo's Same Sex Penguin Couple Split Up. Seems one of the girls was actually bisexual, and started flirting with a boy, which led to fighting, etc. Someone think of the chicks! Hopefully this ends well though.

The Mars Science Laboratory site will let you Send Your Name to Mars. Well, kinda. You'll be included on a microchip, so as soon as the martians learn to create / clone the technology to read human microchips, they'll see a huge ass list of people's name, country and postal code.

Assuming of course their death fleets haven't been learning earthling technology for the invasion already.... :)

The Google Maps blog points out that the blue circle has come to the desktop. The "my location" blue dot you're used to from the iphone/mobile maps, now if you're using a supported (ie: modern: chrome or Firefox 3.5) browser that supports geolocation, right above the zoom bar on the left of the map will be a weeeeee little blue dot that'll get you to about where you are.

Gizmodo has a nice typographical display of How Large Is a Petabyte? In this day and age getting a petabyte isn't that far away (IMHO), so knowing just how huge an amount of data it can hold is a Good Thing.

Fozbaca tweeted about Video for Everybody, a very cool system for embedding video on web pages. It uses a cool system of fallbacks from the HTML5 <video> to flash to quicktime and so on, all without Javascript. It claims to work in pretty much every situation in every OS, even iPhone. Sadly, the iPhone version for me just shows the 'there is a movie here but we won't let you view it' broken icon. Still, very cool.

Holy crap this is the coolest thing ever!!! If you have a moderately recent macbook or other laptop with a multi-touch trackpad you can set up multi-touch tab switching in Firefox! Basically you can set it so that if you twist two fingers on the trackpad it'll switch tabs left and right. Awesome!

A while back we heard that Opera was going to change the web with some special new feature. Looks like that feature has dropped, and it is Opera Unite.

The description is this:

Opera Unite is a unique technology that turns any computer or device running Opera into a Web server. In other words, your computer (running Opera Unite) is truly part of the fabric of the Web, rather than just interacting with it, and it’s something anyone can use.

Doesn't really say what it really is though. Basically the idea is fairly simple, code in the browser runs a small server, which then uses technologies like uPnP and DNS CNAME records to allow users at large to get right to your browser. So if you enable the 'music player' application the browser runs a little webserver that lists music on the computer (in a directory you point it to) and then points <yourusername>.operaunite.com/music to your routers external IP. Combine this with password protection and you can now listen to your music from work. Fairly simple, still fairly revolutionary.

Guess we'll see if it catches on (and if Opera's past has shown, this means "this feature will appear in Firefox 5.0 and IE 11 :)

Some more good analysis over here. Pay attention to the pictures illustrating how things all fit together.

CodeWeavers announced version 8 of their software for Linux and Mac. Crossover is software that allows you to run windows apps on non-windows platforms (if you didn't already know). The new version boasts a bunch of new apps available out of the box, plus lots of improvements in the ones there already (ie: office, outlook, IE7, etc).

Sadly I think the need for Crossover isn't nearly as great anymore. With things like Evolution's Exchange connector and OpenOffice.org out there for free, dealing with an emulation layer just isn't as imperative. Course, there are some apps that have nothing like them in the non-windows world that put Crossover in a good spot.

Sorry for the lack of linkage all day, been out on the job hunt. Anyway, as mac fanboys and iPhone lovers know, tomorrow is iPhone OS 3.0 day. Looks like iPhone 3.0 Update for iPod Touch Page Appeared in iTunes, but then was quickly pulled. I believe things should all be up sometime tomorrow. Looking forward to the update myself, as long as I don't see any "3.0 nuked my phone" posts :)

Looking for a easy URL to send people to like facebook.com/userfriendly ? Well, tonight at 9pm (your time zone) you can go to Facebook.com/Username and sign up for your own. Currently it's only a countdown though. See the facebook blog for some more details.

I didn't know anything about this, but here are some details about the Astalavista.com hack, including details. More reason to a) secure your site and b) learn to use the tools that the blackhats use to ensure that you're secure. Fascinating read (the pastbin link is where you want to go for the good stuff).

Watching this Cool Chameleon video I have to wonder if it's fake or if they really do change that quickly and just because someone stuffs some colored sunglasses under them? Is this 'shopped, or are they that awesome?

Any Panasonic LX3 owners will be happy to know there's a new firmware update (1.3) available just around the corner. DPReview has the details and the link that'll work on the first of June. Minor changes it sounds like, white balance and "general performance" improvements.

Google today announced Google Waves, a new social collaboration, email, twitter, something or other. :) The webmonkey article has a decent description of it though.

As the new user is leaving a comment, everyone involved in the wave can see the comments being typed in, in real time, letter by letter. Edits can be made concurrently, so two or more users can see one anothers’ changes flowing in, even as they’re leaving their comments, making edits or uploading images.

It'll be interesting to see how this does or where it competes when it comes out, that's for sure! Hit wave.google.com for a video and signup page.

Found an article on the typekit blog today Introducing Typekit. Looks like they are working on a way to solve the "font problem" that web designers have been facing. An excerpt:

As a Typekit user, you’ll have access to our library of high-quality fonts. Just add a line of JavaScript to your markup, tell us what fonts you want to use, and then craft your pages the way you always have. Except now you’ll be able to use real fonts. This really is going to change web design.

LyricWiki is a fairly reliable source of lyrics for songs (without the crap that goes along with other sites). So far it's passed the "Arcterex search" test (Johnny Cash and U2), and the quick glance at the lyrics seemed reasonable.

Wordpress (the blog system) has launched Videopress, their New Video Sharing Service. Features include automatic sd/dvd/hd quality conversions, automatic video podcast conversions, and other goodness. Very sexy looking little system. The only fail I found so far was hitting the 'hd' button doesn't continue on from the current location in HD (like youtube) but rather restarts the video in HD.

Wolfram Alpha is live and going. Neat to play with, with very cool visual representation of some things (ie: a number has a "visual representation" display, tides show a curvy graph, etc). It's not like google fore searching for information about something, but about pure information. There are exceptions though, such as when you ask it what is the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything for example.

Passed on from Dave B, check out debris, a PC demo which is amazing, not only in content, but in the fact it fits in 200k and has a better framerate and content than most games you see today. Truly spectacular!

Holy crap... this stuff is amazing. This mom let her child ride the subway alone! What's amazing you ask? Well, how about the media sh-t storm that has come up about it, calling her (among other things), "America's Worst Mom". Some of her article is below:

A day later, there across from me was Ann Curry looking outrageously pretty and slightly alarmed, because her next guest (the one right before George Clooney) just might be criminally insane. By way of introduction, she turned to the camera and asked, “Is she an enlightened mom or a really bad one?”

When I was a kid my parents let me run around in the woods alone. I rode my bike 5-10 km to the lake and back. I explored around the gravel pit. Sometimes I carried around an axe, or a knife. I'm still alive and (though some may argue) turned out perfectly normal. Maybe it's different in places like NYC though, apparently "experts" think this was akin to throwing your child into a pit of hungry wolves. Fascinating article anyway, love this quote too:

"[...] he was safe! That’s why I let him go, you fear-mongering hypocrite, preaching independence while warning against it!”

Via Boing Boing is a story about a Nine-year-old playing Ozzy on the guitar. Now ignoring the fact he's on the Ellen show, playing guitar is going to get this kid all the chicks he can handle (well, when he gets interested in them of course, I mean, he's only 9).

Last but no least are some details on requirements for Windows 7's XP mode. Short story, VT based chip and 2G of ram. Rumors and conjecture of course, and lets be honest, if you've bought a computer in the last 2 years it probably has these specs already! Update WinSupersite has more details on XP Mode.

The Apple Blog has a neat article onPhoto Editing Options When iPhoto Isn’t Enough. Basically non-photoshop solutions for the mac for when you need something a bit above what iPhoto gives you. Personally I'm a lightroom guy, though I will whip out the GIMP when I need something quick and dirty.

Via reddit comes a set of 25 images entitled Brutus and Me, a photographic story of a man and his bear, Brutus, a bear raised from a cub. My favorite pics are six and nine for their pure surrealness :)

Of course, I really expected to read something about the man mysteriously being mauled and eaten! Sounds like this story has a happy ending though.

Two new services were announced by google today. First check out Google Similar Images (which is pretty much what it sounds like) and then Google News Timeline, which displays google news in a... uhm... timeline, to help you visualize how news has happened in relation to the rest of the day/week.

Next time you think your camera is too heavy, or you don't want to go on your photo walk with that heavy 18-250 zoom lens, check this monster out and count yourself lucky. Course, a 600mm/2.8 might not be a good walkaround lens come to think of it....

Looks like 10 years later, the real story behind Columbine is coming out. Turns out pretty much everything you know, thought you know, and were told about it was mostly wrong. Hell, complete books were written about incidents that simply never happened. Isn't modern communications and information dissemination awesome? :)

Speaking of twitter and trends, found out about Susan Boyle on Britains Got Talent 2009. It's reminiscent of Paul Potts (the opera guy) from a couple of years ago. It's one of those unexpected things that it is pretty awesome to watch/listen to, if for nothing more than to see the look on the judges faces just before she starts singing... the looks of "what is this old bat doing" followed quickly by "WTF she's awesome" is great to see.

The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system. A regular hyperlink implicates a browser, its DNS resolver, the publisher's DNS server, and the publisher's website. With a shortening service, you're adding something that acts like a third DNS resolver, except one that is assembled out of unvetted PHP and MySQL...

I have to concur. I feel this way about the Digg service, which not only does the above, but also keeps you "on" the digg page with their toolbar of "services". Kinda like framing someone else's page ("deep linking"?) with your own ad banners. Of course in this case it's not ads, but digg-ing tools. Still, it's a logical next step (and I'm sure some tinyurl services do just this. Personally I want my tinyurl services to just give me a bookmark to the page I really want to go to, nothing more.

Joshua goes through a bunch of other issues that exists, both for the user and the publisher of the page that you're going to. Well worth a read.

Remeber that cool mod that surfaced a couple of weeks ago where a guy hacked a macbook to replace the apple logo on the back with a full LCD screen? Well, if you're wanting to try it out yourself, a tutorial has been posted with parts needed, etc. This isn't a simple change mind you, and it's very possible you're going to void your warranty ;)

Digg released their new DiggBar product, another URL shortening service which additionally gives you "digg stuff" in a toolbar when you go to the page with the short URL form.

Likes for me is as a digg user, it might make things more convenient. Dis-likes is that it keeps you "in" digg when you might not want it. URL shortening services should (IMHO) just do that, shorten the URL for easier twittering or facebooking, and when you click on the short URL, it takes you to the normal URL. This keeps you in the short URL and puts extra stuff on top that you might object to or you might not.

Interesting to see if the size of digg will give this more traction than the tons of other short-url services out there.

Super-cute pics of two baby Leopards born: Rare Cubs Born Against the Odds is the title. Seems that in captivity the mothers often do damage to their cubs, which I wonder is an instinctual thing based on being in an undesirable place to have offspring (ie: a zoo) or if it's something that "just happens". Regardless of this, those babys are damn cute!

According to the updates on the Google Earth Blog, there is now Live Imagery from Another Planet. According to the update there is a layer available on the mars imagery that contains the latest data from satellites which can be as fresh as a few hours. Not quite live, but close!

The concept is super-simple, setup how you want to read things (font size, style, margins), and then when you go to a page that's filled with crap that interferes with the content (ie: 99% of the webpages out there, except UFies.org of course), hit the bookmarklet button, and boom, perfectly readable with no crap around it. Pretty awesome stuff. Another blog entry about it here on if:else.

Great article on The unrecognizable Internet of 1996. Story via slashdot. Man, 1996 I was in University, was probably working in my first tech job doing tech support, and may have heard of that free unix "linux" thingy. My time was probably more likely spent putting in dirty domain names into the web browsers on campus during class and seeing if "bigboobs.com" was a real site or not. If only then I'd thought of buying up domain names!

A comment on slashdot posted links to some Safari 4 demos of uses for the new HTML5 support it has. The second comment has direct links to a bunch of very cool things. Sadly I doubt you'll see any of these in the wild simply due to the small Safari market share.

Perfectly timed.... a review of Replacement iPhone earphones. I tried out the TuneBuds myself, but the chord somehow managed to fray at the plugin connection and I lost my left earphone :( Too bad too, they were pretty nice.

OK, here's the story. Lowlife scum fucktards video tape themselves abusing a cat. Lowlife scum fucktards post to Youtube. Story is picked up by various news websites (reddit, digg, etc). Internet has outcry over abuse to cat by lowlife scum sucking bastard fucktards. Then the power of the Internet is harnessed away from porn and Internet memes and it's power is used for good.

Lowlife scum sucking loser bastard fucktards have their youtube video Zaprudered to hell and back, their identities connected through various social networking sites, their likenesses compared, backgrounds in the video are compared to other images they've posted, (think of this as a 2 minute montage of hackers working away desperately) and then the evidence all compiled and authorities, PETA, and local news are contacted.

The better news is the cat (Dusty) is alive and has been put in the care of the animal shelter and away from the aforementioned fucktards. Sadly the abusers were released to their parents custody instead of being in jail with some nice men who can give them a bit of abuse to see what it's like to be helpless and being picked on by someone 100x their size. Please note that the video is a newscast but still does show some disturbing images and audio (even though it's edited for TV) which personally I had to fast forward through. I'm very glad that this had a happy ending.

Crazy Albertans and their crazy SABLE-3 Balloons. Who things of sending a camera attached to a balloon up to 121,000 feet? This is a bit old, August of 2007, still very cool (and it showed up while I was surfing reddit this morning).

I have no idea why, as I'm not a vodka drinker (unless it's mixed with orange juice), but this Skittles Vodka Tutorial screams "do this!" to me for some reason. How would you drink this? Just plain vodka? Is that kosher?

Adblock plus, the adblock extension for Firefox, makes a case for themselves in their anatomy of ads.

Personally I very rarely use a browser without adblock installed on it, and when I do (or use something that's not Firefox) I always have a feeling of "oh gads, is this what normal people have to deal with?" I realize I'm stealing from the pockets of web developers and the little guy (hey, I run google adsense on this site, and notice a decrease in the meager return I get from it over the last year or so (hint hint)), but the arms race of the advertisers adding more and more ads to pages has just made a non-adblocked Internet unbearable.

How cool is this, and how good of a grade do you think these guys are going to get? Students call space station with home-built radio. How long before I can buy a ISS radio at Radio Shack and bug the astronauts too, or they start getting peppered with penis enlargement spam messages?!